“Machine gunners?” The recruit I’d decided to take along tonight kept his voice quiet as we set out from the dugout in the hour after midnight.
“Raise your spade, and our gunners will lay down fire for us to retreat.” That was all we said, ghosting along in the warm night from the dugout to the thicketed hideout. Slithering like shadows under the cloudless sky, hauling our rifles and our bags of cartridges. An hour to cover six hundred meters.
Watch now, as my recruit and I do our homework. The dull, painstaking part no one imagines when they think of this dark work done under a dark sky. This isn’t like the demonstration Captain Sergienko asked me to give in the bombed-out farmhouse; and it isn’t like my stakeout in the maple tree, either, where I’d camouflaged myself to blend into the leaves. This is ground that has to be prepared, and that means hours in the pitch-black digging trenches and small parapets, reinforcing them with stones and turf—because snipers are more likely to fire from hidden ground positions than lofty rooftops or trees, contrary to popular belief. Then the hours of lying down in our nests, placing rifle barrels to find optimal stability, testing the direction of the wind, calculating the distances. And then the wait, two of us folded into the torn earth as the stars wheel and the enemy sleeps. The waiting is where green snipers show their inexperience; they fidget and rattle their cartridges, break down enough to reach for their cigarettes. The dark Siberian lies quiet an arm’s length away, calm-blooded, his eyes just a gleam in the starlight.
Watch now as dawn comes. As movement stirs the enemy like heat roiling the surface of a soup kettle, soldiers walking about, calling to each other, thinking themselves safe. The field kitchen sets up, officers give loud orders, a medical station swarms with the gleaming white smocks of medics. One gesture to my new recruit—I’d target the left flank, he’d take the right. A returning nod.
Watch now as the day warms. Fingers flex, loosening, becoming pliant. The heart stirs. The sun climbs. The rifle sings softly to me, and artillery fire rumbles overhead. I begin the countdown to twelve, to my midnight.
Watch.
The first kill is mine. A Romanian officer in a cloth kepi topples over; the Siberian snaps off his first shot before my first target has even finished falling, and I see a second officer stagger. Our shots are masked in the rumble of artillery; for a moment no one can see who or what is dropping their officers, and we pick off two more before they all begin to panic. I fire and fire and fire, the Siberian racking shot after shot at my side, and it isn’t until machine-gun rounds begin to thrash the thickets around us that we pull up and slide back into the brush, raising our spades for covering fire.
Back behind our own lines, gasping from the final sprint, I look at my companion. “Seventeen shots, sixteen kills. You?”
“Seventeen shots, twelve kills.” The first words he’d spoken in the last twelve hours, and he sounds angry at himself for those five shots that missed.
“I took seven bullets to drop my first two. It happens.” We settled in the dugout in the steel-gray morning light, stripping and cleaning our rifles. “Congratulations—your tally is opened.”
A nod, and he went back to oiling the barrel. His hands were trembling just slightly; he was trying to hide that from me.
“Hold your hand out,” I said.
He hesitated.
I held up my own so he could see it was shaking. “Nervous tension,” I said. “It comes on after the sortie is done, but it goes away.” I’d learned that by now, but he hadn’t yet. “You weren’t shaking when there was shooting to be done, were you?” I asked gently.
“No. But I still missed five shots.” He didn’t scowl, but his face darkened. “I’ve hunted since I was a child. I haven’t missed like that since I was eight years old.”
“Firing at a human being for the first time—it’s not the same as firing at a deer. There’s no pretending it is.”