Order 270 was Stalin’s decree that the families of deserters or shirkers would be arrested as a consequence of their criminality. Mili snorted privately; her family was dead.
Within hours, she found herself clinging by a handhold to the hull of a T-34 (the commander was twenty and blond, reminding her a little of her dead brother Gregori) as it roared, amid a legion of its brethren, out of the village, deployed into a large wedge formation in the dawn light as far as the eye could see, and began its passage through the fields and the German artillery toward combat with another tank formation. The tanks scuttled and adjusted as they squirmed into the formation, cranking this way and that to find the right line and distance with regard to the others until all, more or less, had formed up. Like some kind of dinosaur army, they lurched forward, grinding across hill, dale, creek, tree, gully without regard, spewing smoke and grit, their long cannon barrels slightly upraised. They looked like beetles with a knight’s lance tucked into their mandibles.
They were on a plain under a dome of sky. All was flatness. It was an infinity of flatness under the towering clouds of the Ukrainian sky. It was a battle reduced to its essential elements with no distractions, almost an abstraction: the existential flatness of the plain to the horizon, the vaulting blue arch of cloud-filled sky, the sense of tininess of men and machines on this construction that only a mad god could have invented. The tanks lurched ahead.
The sensations attacked her nervous system: the overwhelming smell of engine smoke and gasoline, the cruel bouncing as the tank’s suspension absorbed and then passed along the shocks of its encounters with the rough ground, the shriek of the incoming artillery, the percussion of its detonation. Nearby, a tank was hit and, in a second, vanished into a shearing blade of light as its destruction issued vibration and shrapnel through the air, to beat and cut at what lay in its route. She clung desperately, trying to stay with the beast beneath her, but it was not easy. Another sniper, clinging to another handhold on the other side of the tank, slipped off, as if into a gritty sea, and was never seen again.
The tanks rolled through the storm and through an ocean of noise as each engine, each shell, each crack of a tree limb crushed beneath treads seemed to hang in the air, like a whole climate of noise, all of it beating at her senses until so powerful was the experience that it seemed to numb her out.
Then she saw them, a mile off, small and seemingly inconsequential. The machines of the 2nd Panzer Corps, three divisions’ worth, Das Reich, Totenkopf, and Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. From the distance, they were black shapes on the horizon, which rose and fell in accordance to their own tank’s course through the dips in the landform.
At a mile, the Germans opened up. It was simple strategy; any child could figure it out. The German armor was thicker, the German guns bigger and more powerful. Distance was the German ally. If it was only about shooting, the Germans—superb tank marksmen, superb battlefield maneuverers—would triumph. The tanks of the 5th Guards had to close the gap, get inside the German formation, find angles into the enemy that would let their lighter 76mm shells penetrate and kill. The cost of this adventure was paid in life. Sixty percent of the Soviet tanks would make it to the target; the other 40 percent would die in flame and high-explosive energy at the end of the 88mm trajectories. So it had to be. So it would be. The price would be paid. Who would pay it?
Around her, tanks began to light up. Some, hit squarely by the 88s, vaporized and, when the smoke abated, seemed not to have existed at all. But there were so many variations on death in that charging wave of vehicle and bravado. Hit, a 34 might be tilted askew, flames licking at it, until it suddenly blossomed, went to total fire. Or it might not burn at all, merely throwing a track and thrashing in roaring frustration as its treadless wheels ground away, spitting earth and buzzsawing itself more deeply into the ground.
So powerful was the vibration of her vehicle, Petrova could see none of this clearly. Her eyes were teared up from the dust that had settled in them, her purchase on survival was focused entirely on the strength in her hands that clung to the steel rung preventing her from slipping off and away, her head pounded in pain from all the vibrations that shuddered against it, the fumes of engine exhaust, explosive residue, and the smell of cooking meat. Images seemed to fly before her and vanish, as if she were in a cinema where the projector was mounted to the back of a crazed horse and pitched its visions on the walls and ceiling. Burning men. The shear of light from a blast. The recoil when her own tank fired. The pressure from others. The far-off blisters of illumination from the Tiger 88mm muzzles, the rain of dust, the smack and sting of debris, it was all a kind of Dostoyevskian vision of hell.
Then it went away as her tank slid into a dip in the land and, with dozens of its co-attackers, was momentarily out of the view of German gunsights. It felt like an abrupt passage to heaven as the ground beneath became smooth, almost reasonable. The tanks were grinding through a wheat field; she looked back to see the long scars each vehicle inscribed into the undulating sheaves of wheat, that staple in which her father had invested his life and even, it could be said, died to protect.
I will not let you down, Tata, she thought. I will be as brave as you. I will protect the wheat.
At that moment they crested the slope, their momentary disengagement finished, and plunged into a storm of violence. The German tanks were close. She’d seen them before, crawling tentatively through Stalingrad’s wrecked streets, but not like this, columns and columns of the things, with their remorseless angularity, their pitiless precision, the somehow Teutonic-knight definition of their profiles. The Germans were beyond panic; they were beyond anything but pure, calm, relentless battle skill. The gunners chose and worked targets as the Soviet force closed, and even when it became obvious that there were enough survivors of the charge to breach the German formation and turn the battle into a melee, the German gunners simply lowered their trajectories, tracked their targets, and continued to fire.
The two forces closed.
Now it was tank on tank, almost like a naval battle as the vessels of each side maneuvered at speed for positional leverage, angle to unarmored vitals, accuracy, and firing speed, kicking up dust, spraying debris and mud as they adjusted. It had Trafalgar or Jutland or the Armada entwined through it. The smaller Russian vehicles juked, switched attack angles radically, feinted, and jitterbugged, looking for that elusive sideways angle into the slower, bigger vehicles, which, though not as maneuverable, had more able gunners and seldom missed a shot.
She was in a cauldron of blast heat and concussion, wondering how on earth she could get a clean shot off. At that point her own vehicle came to a halt, almost spilling her, and she heard a mechanical buzz and whirr as the twenty-year-old in the turret rotated. One hundred meters ahead, seen through the squalls of smoke that dominated the battlefield, a Tiger emerged from behind the burning wreckage of another Tiger, and her boy fired. She felt the rock as the tank discharged its shell, saw it hit the flank on the squared profile and detonate, casting a galaxy of sparks pinwheeling into the air. The German was not fazed; his own turret ground another few degrees and he fired, the shock of the blast ripping up the earth beneath the muzzle, and in the next nanosecond the impact tossed Petrova, light as a feather and frail as a sparrow, into the sky. She landed with a bone-jarring, concussion-inducing thud, her mind fragmenting into slivers as stars danced and planets crashed. In a second, alone and feeling naked on a battlefield full of raging monsters, she picked up enough sense to seek shelter behind the burned-out wreck of a tank, so melted and charred that its alliance could not be discerned. She crouched, looking back to the vehicle that had ferried her to this place, and saw it listed over, smoke issuing from its hatch, until it was engulfed in flame. Nobody got out, and of its other snipers aboard, none could be seen.
She disengaged her rifle from its sling, cinched up, and found a shooting position. She looked for targets. In time, her peripheral vision oriented her toward a blur of movement, and she
saw a Tiger grinding through a glade of higher vegetation. It was hit, and a massive geyser of dust engulfed it. Then the cloud cleared and she saw that the thing had taken a shell in the tread, the tread snaked free, driven by the power axle, though the tank was immobile. Its turret hatch opened and she found her position, waited for a man to emerge at the tip of the post reticule in her scope. As he came, her finger killed him. His head jerked at the shot, and his body seemed to turn to liquid as he slipped back into the vehicle. Then a smear of incandescence erupted at the juncture of turret and hull, and in seconds the thing was leaking smoke like blood, then flames, and it was gone to inferno. The dead man had blocked the others from escape.
She looked over her sight, preferring to immediately abandon that image and let her eyes adjust after the brightness of the flame, and scanned the battlefield, seeing vehicle after vehicle conflagrated, all the smoke rising, drifting skyward to form a pall over the battlefield, a low, dark sky that portended the world’s end. Noises—screams, detonations, the rip of metal tearing—filled the air, and waves of heat and grit rode blast zephyrs into her face and eyes. Ashes floated, blotting skin where they landed.
Another tank emerged from the haze, already leaking a tendril of smoke. Who knew what hell it concealed. She planted the rifle against her shoulder, steadied on the turret—not a long shot, less by far than two hundred yards—and felt her trigger stack. He came out—aflame. He rolled back across the hull, over the engine cooling grate, kicking, his arms flailing, nothing left but his agony. Her finger killed him with one shot. Another flamer crawled out and she killed him before he could roll off the turret.
Once she’d committed the unpardonable sin, she could not stop. The plan was ill conceived because the visibility on the battlefield was so limited that scampering panzer crew could not be seen at all, but the dancing flamers, their garish ignition fluttering brilliantly through the drift of smoke and ash, were easy to spot. She shot them all. It didn’t matter.
She made a shot at five hundred yards, holding half a man high; she made one at fifty yards, drilling him as he leaped out of the half-track that already had turned into a bonfire. She shot not at men but at flames, for the men were largely indistinct in their cloaks of flaring brilliance. Russian, German, peasant, aristocrat, who knew? Their insane jerkiness contained their suffering; she could not abide it and she put them down into stillness.
It was almost ritual. When the rifle fired dry, she slid another stripper into the breach and thumbed five more cartridges into the magazine well, then tossed away the empty stripper and rammed the bolt home, and remounted the rifle against the tension of the strap. Through the circle of the optic, she saw it all, death at the apex of industrial application, but by now her ears were numb, so it was silent cinema, the same thirty feet of film over and over in an endless loop, the flamer clawing at the pulses of energy that consumed his flesh in agony and then the arrival of the message of mercy as his blazing body went slack and he tumbled down. Cock and look anew for a target. In the end, she killed more than fifty unrecorded men that day, only the first one without the flames.
It abated around five. The few surviving tanks limped back to their own lines. It was clear that while the Russians had lost far more, they had stopped the Germans. In fact, it was clear that the war was now technically over. Only a thousand miles of mopping up remained, and though that would be a hideous task and claim millions or more lives, the shattering of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps ended Hitler’s invasion. He would, he could, never be on the offense again.
If she knew this, it didn’t matter. She was exhausted and somehow ashamed. She felt no glory. Around her there lay a wilderness of dead machines, half of them burning, amid a stench of gas and blood, the occasional loud blast as a shell was lit off by flames, but nobody was shooting anymore. Everybody was too tired to shoot. The setting sun burned through the haze of smoke and ash in the air, and it went all red on the world, on this hunk of field outside Prokhorovka, as if to signify the shedding of so much blood. All was red in the light, the gray German tanks, the green Russian tanks, the dun-colored wheat, the green trees, the white flesh: all suffused in the red of blood.
She disengaged her water bottle, unscrewed the cap, and put it to her mouth. A warm swish of water cut through the phlegm of ash that encased her lips. She took off her hood, felt her hair cascade free. She looked around again.
Remember it, Petrova, she instructed herself. Infinite destruction. Ruin to the horizon and death everywhere. Stalingrad in the wheat fields without a ruined city to hide the ripe slaughter.
* * *
A whistle, loud and urgent, came from close by, jerking her from the field of ruin and death at Kursk to the German boot a few inches from her face. She heard him grunt as if cursing. He tamped his pipe against the receiver of his machine pistol. Burning tobacco from the emptied pipe fell to the ground a few inches ahead of her. His boots finally lurched forward. She heard a few shouts, the exchange of Serbian curse words, and some crude laughter. The boots vanished.
She raised her head just an inch or two and opened her eyes fully.
The German patrol had vanished in the woods.
Someone had recalled them—urgently.
She waited another half an hour, then picked herself up.
The boots. She remembered the boots. A thousand burned corpses lay about the flatness of Kursk, some licked by flame, some just blurred chars. Yet almost all had their boots still on, because for some reason, while the flesh burned, the leather didn’t. Everywhere she saw nothing but the boots of the dead.
CHAPTER 35
The Carpathians
New Village of Yaremche
THE PRESENT
There’s not much to do in the Carpathians after the sun goes down.
“Get a good night’s rest,” Swagger said. “Tomorrow we’ll go up into the hills and I’ll see if I can find where she shot from. I want to see her angle from the edge of the burned zone and get a read on distance.”
He knew she had to shoot from beyond five hundred yards. She had to. She couldn’t be in the burned zone because she’d be wide open. But at the five-hundred-yard mark, where the trees offered cover, that’s where they’d put people. They’d have camouflaged guys there. They’d have dog teams nearby. That’s the trap, and they know they’ve got her, just as they know she has to go for it, because here he is, her target, this is the only opportunity she’ll get.
Swagger knew how a sniper’s mind worked. She’d shoot high to low, especially if she’s already high. How would she even get to low, the place is crawling with Germans? They built a real good trap. Groedl’s a smart piece of shit.
But it was the rifle that had him buffaloed. Not where she got it but why she did what she did. She could not have hit him with a Mosin, even with a scope. There was no record of a one-shot cold-bore kill at five hundred yards with a Mosin. If she fired, she was doomed. She was throwing away her life on a zero chance of probability. It was effectively a suicide, a sacrifice for the good of a tribe that denied it. But she had to do it. She had no choice.
He thought hard about the site. The bridge, the mist from the waterfall, the image of the shoot on the plate by some anonymous artist who probably hadn’t been there. The burned zone on the slope to the northwest, the only high space to shoot from. The slope barren to a five-hundred-yard line, and poor Petrova up there, as close as possible, taking the shot that would let the dogs out on her. Maybe she shot twice, took the one at the far-off Nazi, and then put the muzzle in her mouth and hit the trigger. No torture, no interrogation, just a case of the sniper giving all to duty. But then an image came into his head.
He first saw it as a golden wall. What the hell? It floated just beyond his knowing but close enough to tantalize him: a gold wall.
Then it came into focus. He recalled that beyond the hill whose slope overlooked the waterfall and whose foliage had been half burned away, to the southwest, there was the golden wall of another slope, so far off it
was hazy in the distance.
It had to be a thousand yards out.
You could not hit a man at a thousand yards with a Mosin-Nagant.
You could only do it with a—
Bob had to laugh. Now, there was a funny idea. Somehow Petrova manages to get her hands on—
It was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
He thought a second and went to his e-mail on his iPhone. “You up? Need talk urgent. Can you call me at—” and he listed Reilly’s satellite number. A few seconds later, her phone rang. He took it. “Swagger.”
“Well, hello, chum. How’s the Yank?” It was his friend J. T. “Jimmy” Guthrie, the sniper historian from the UK.
“Hi, Jimmy, how’re you doing?”
“I’m swell. I assume you’re calling because you’re going to come to our Sniper Match at Bisley. The fellows will be so excited.”
“No, no, it’s something else. I need to rent your brain.”
“It’s yours for a penny. If you haven’t got a penny, then a ha’penny will do.”
“Last we talked, you were working on a book on the World War II British sniper rifle.”
“My favorite, the Enfield No. 4 (T) with the No. 32 scope. A classic.”
“Still working at it?”
“Chop chop, tap tap, got to keep churning them out, it’s what I do.”
“Can you verify any one-shot cold-bore hits with it at over a thousand yards?”
“Several times. In Italy, in northern France, and in Twelveland itself, near war’s end. The No. 4 (T) was the ace of sniper rifles.”
“Any other shots that long that you know of by other rifles?”