He blinked. “Where’s the commander?”
“I’m the commander.”
“Quit having us on, Lyuda, that’s no way to—”
I unfolded fully, lowering the manual so they could see my corporal’s tabs and raising my voice to my father’s bellow. “At. Attention.”
A dark-haired man stepped from the back and came to, smartly. A long silence fell; I tried not to hold my breath. Then the sailor named Fyodor Sedykh stepped into line beside the first man, still looking puzzled, and one by one the rest fell in.
“You’re here because snipers will be needed in the push to come,” I continued, walking the line, meeting each pair of eyes one by one. Some blue and some brown, some insolent and some curious. “Let’s see if you have what it takes. Cartridges over there, take five each.” I came to the last recruit, the one who had come to attention first. “Let’s start with you.” He was older than the others, nearer thirty-five than twenty-five, a compact razor of a man pared down to sinew, bone, and whiplike tendon. His cap sat on black hair razed down to stubble like a winter wheat field, and when he met my gaze, I knew him.
“Did you get past Austerlitz in War and Peace?” I asked the Siberian I’d last seen in the trenches before I was first wounded.
He gave a single nod, not smiling, but there was a smile folded into the corners of his eyes.
I nearly smiled back. “Name, Private?”
“K. A. Shevelyov.” His voice was quiet, steady, educated.
“Let’s see what you can do.” I stood back as he began loading in swift movements. I already knew from our first meeting in the trenches that he could shoot, but I wanted the others to see him following my orders. “Then the rest of you, starting with Fyodor over there with the smart mouth.” A smile, to let him know I was willing to joke as long as he fell in line. “If any of you are any good, I’ll take you with me on a sortie and see how you do in the field.”
“If you’re Pavlichenko,” Fyodor challenged, “are you the one with a tally of forty-six?”
“Fifty-one. Load your rifles.”
They began to load, some looking impressed, some looking resentful. Either way, I knew they were mine.
PARAPHRASING TOLSTOY SHOULDN’T be allowed, but I can’t help it: unsuccessful hunts are all alike; every successful hunt is successful in its own way. （I didn’t finish Anna Karenina any more than I finished War and Peace, but even I knew the first line.） A successful day for a sniper might involve ten kills or a tense standoff with no kill at all. An unsuccessful day for a sniper is the day you miss and end up dead. So the eternal question—What is it like, to be a sniper?—has no answer. Every day was different. If it was a day I lived, it was a good day.
But what is it like? I could hear my trainee snipers asking, silently. I saw that question in Eleanor’s eyes a year later—even the First Lady of the United States wasn’t immune to morbid curiosity. What is it like, Lyudmila?
You are asking too, aren’t you?
All right. Come with me.
Watch now, as I take you on a sortie. Not a particularly important sortie—I didn’t bag an adjutant that night or a Gestapo colonel carrying secret plans from Hitler. I’ll take you along on the night where I found my partner, the other half of my dark moon—for a sniper, a discovery far more important than the night you meet your true love. Husbands, as I have had cause to know, cannot always be trusted. A sniper puts her life in the hands of her partner, night after night after night. He had better be someone she trusts more than a husband.
I’d sited the hideout earlier during the day, everything reconnoitered down to the last blade of grass. A thicket of shrubs—one hundred and fifty meters long, twelve to fifteen wide—in the broad no-man’s-land stretching beyond our front line, the narrow end piercing the Romanian defensive line like a spear, ending in a shallow gully near the enemy’s second echelon.