“It’s a tangle out here,” he said frankly, heating some water in a mess tin for tea. I sat on an upturned crate, my shoulder hard against Kostia’s as he rewound the bandage on his hand. “Second Company’s down by half. We came up against the Hitlerites at the end of October near Ishun—beat them back, but their mortars and Messers ground us down, and we were being deployed almost on the open steppe. Too exposed; that was where Sergienko got it. Direct hit on the battalion command post; completely shattered his leg.”
“Will he make it?” Throat tightening for the man who’d elevated me to sniper; kept his amorous fellow officers from pestering me; given me my first promotion.
“He’ll make it, but he won’t walk again. It’s a desk for Sergienko now.”
At least he’d survive this war. I already missed my calm, competent captain—badly—but at least he was alive. “And the regiment?”
Fyodor passed out the tea along with some precious hoarded sugar and plain biscuits. “Down to six, seven hundred.”
Six or seven hundred, from the three thousand it would have been in peacetime. “And my squad?” I asked, taking Kostia’s injured hand and tying off the wrapping, since he was having trouble doing it one-handed. In my pack I’d brought gifts for each and every one of the men I’d trained, bought while waiting in Sevastopol—mostly flasks of brandy or bars of chocolate, though for Fyodor I had a tin of his favorite sardines in oil, and for Kostia a secondhand copy of Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches bought in a bookshop, remembering his much-battered War and Peace . . . but now my heart clutched, realizing I hadn’t seen any of the other men I’d trained. The Kiev boy with the acne-scarred face, the lanky sailor from Minsk . . . “How many are left?”
Kostia spoke for the first time. “Us.”
I’d commanded ten, I thought sickly. Now I had two. These Germans were a different kettle of fight. “When can we get more men?” I said more to myself than the others. “More men, more rifles . . .”
“I’ll see what I can get for you,” a cheerful voice said behind me, and when I looked over my shoulder, I was surprised to see the big blond lieutenant. Any last lingering hope that he didn’t remember me shriveled as he said, “You look different with dry hair, Pavlichenko.”
“So do you,” I said stiffly. “Comrade Lieutenant.”
“I was on leave when we last met, hence the civilian clothes. I didn’t transfer to 2nd Company until I arrived in Sevastopol—Comrade Lieutenant Kitsenko, at least in the command post.” He offered a hand. “Off-duty, Alexei.”
The name made me blink. It wasn’t his fault he was a tall, blond, blue-eyed lieutenant like my husband, but did he have to be named Alexei, too? Then I blinked again, as Kostia jumped up with a broad grin and embraced the new arrival as though they were brothers.
“You’ll get your platoon,” Kitsenko told me, thumping Kostia’s back with a friendly fist and coming to sit on an old oil drum. “Dromin’s just kicking and squealing. He knows he can’t argue with Petrov.”
“Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant.” He was being friendly, but I couldn’t help wondering if his had been the voice speculating that I was General Petrov’s bed warmer. All because of one careless kiss . . .
“My friends call me Lyonya,” Kitsenko said with a grin, feinting at Kostia, who slipped the mock punch and threw one back. “And you’re Lyudmila Pavlichenko. When I met up with Kostia here, I asked him about this brunette vision I’d seen come out of a bathhouse like Venus from a clamshell, and Kostia told me all about you.”
The breezy flattery caught me off guard, but not as much as this unexpected camaraderie. “How do you two know each other?”
“Met years ago in Donetsk, in technical school,” Kitsenko said, reaching for a biscuit. “I see this skinny kid from Irkutsk come prowling into the classroom like a nervous wolf—”