“Everyone in the class poking fun at my accent,” Kostia said. “Except him—”
“Oh, I made fun of your accent, too. Siberian vowels that could cut ice. But I thought, That’s a feral little bastard that will be useful in a hockey scrum; let’s be friends.”
“And then an ox from Leningrad said my mother was a whore, and Lyonya broke his nose.” Kostia shook his head, still grinning, and I stared. I hadn’t heard my silent partner volunteer so many words in—well, ever. “So I invite this big-city boy here to Irkutsk to visit, that fall—”
“—and his father took us on a hunt, and I saw that was the real wolf,” Kitsenko finished, shuddering. “Something out of Baba Yaga’s nightmares.”
I wondered how one man could be a lieutenant and the other a corporal considering they must have joined around the same time, but Kostia said, “Lyonya took the accelerated course for middle-rank officer corps under the coastal army general staff.”
“And now I get to give him orders,” Kitsenko said with another feinted punch. “Now let’s hear about you, Lyudmila Mikhailovna. If you’ve got a hundred and eighty-seven scalps, why haven’t you earned an Order of Glory or two?”
“I don’t do it for glory,” I said, not quite able to keep the edge out of my voice.
“She does it for the liquor.” Fyodor laughed, passing a cup of the rot-gut army vodka. “Not to mention the luxury accommodations around here.”
Kitsenko smiled but persisted. “Really—why not a single decoration on that tunic?”
I shrugged, but Fyodor answered for me. “Sergienko passed her name up for commendations, but they must have died on someone’s desk. Someone over his head, who didn’t like our Mila here—”
“Someone who didn’t feel like pinning stars on a woman’s tunic,” Kostia observed.
“They’ll get used to the idea,” said Kitsenko. “You know Comrade Stalin’s ordered three all-female combat regiments formed in the Red Air Force, under Marina Raskova? They’ll be pinning red stars and gold stars on hundreds of ladies by the new year.” He smiled at me, frank and admiring. “You’ll get your share, Mila.”
I paused, looking at him over my mug of tea. “Sir,” I said at last, wondering how not to give offense, but wanting this line drawn here and now before his flirtatious first impression of me turned into an assumption that I was available. “Kostia and Fyodor call me Mila. They’ve guarded my back, and I’ve guarded theirs. We’ve killed together, fought together, bled together. I don’t give my nickname unless it’s to a brother in arms.”
“Then until we bleed together,” Kitsenko said without rancor, and raised his mug of tea in salute. “I imagine Sevastopol will give us the opportunity.”
He was certainly correct about that.
Chapter 12
My memoir, the official version: I was given the responsibility of recruiting and training a proper platoon of snipers—the first woman of the Red Army so honored.
My memoir, the unofficial version: I have no idea if I was the first Red Army woman to lead a platoon, but someone in the propaganda office decided it sounded better that way, so there I was with my ragtag little band of fumble-fingered amateurs that was absolutely nothing like a proper platoon.
A REAL RIFLE platoon would be fifty-one troops commanded by a lieutenant and a deputy senior sergeant, the men beneath them divided into four sections each with their own sergeant. There would be a mortar section, a dispatch rider, clear lines of organization. Mine was a handful of raw recruits grudgingly pointed in my direction by Lieutenant Dromin, who culled them from the marine infantry battalions when reinforcements arrived in November. The scene played itself out exactly as it had when I was given my first batch of trainees: the men argued with me about whether or not I was their commander; they argued about whether I had or had not killed one hundred and eighty-seven enemies; they argued about whether or not women belonged on the front line. But frankly you have heard enough of that sort of thing by now, and so had I, so let us move on to the point when they were listening, more or less, and I had a platoon, more or less.