“Trench?” he said at last, swallowing the last of his bread.
“Trench,” I agreed. “And you know who else we need.”
Kostia looked at me and grinned, his teeth a sudden gleam of white under the quarter moon. “Ivan?”
“Ivan.”
The colonel of the 79th was dubious, but he agreed to lend us a team of sappers. Hidden in the frosty thickets of juniper and hazelnut bushes, the men dug out a trench after nightfall, in the early hours of darkness when the day’s shellfire had lapsed but before the German sniper would return to his nest after midnight. “It’s deep enough,” one complained, chafing the blisters on his hand from spading the frozen earth.
“Eighty centimeters deep, ten meters long.” I waved my papers. “I’ve done the calculations.”
“I’ll show you what you can do with your calculations,” the man mumbled.
“I’ve reached 226 right now in my sniper’s tally,” I remarked. “Keep talking if you want to be 227.”
Trench dug, Kostia and I unfolded a metal frame and canvas drape over it and spent a full eight hours camouflaging it with twigs, brush, and armfuls of snow. And we worked on another little sniper’s trick we’d long ago nicknamed Ivan. “He doesn’t have much in the way of personality,” I said, standing back and surveying our work.
“Don’t criticize Ivan,” Kostia said. “He’s my brother in arms.”
“Speaking of which . . .” I held up my rifle, the one my partner had customized for my hands, my eyes, my habits while I was laid up. “I didn’t have a chance yet to thank you for this. It’s perfect, Kostia.”
“Let’s get 227 with it,” he said, the smile back in the corners of his eyes, and we crawled into our nest.
The best time for a sniper begins an hour and a half after midnight. That’s when a shooter usually moves into position, and my partner and I were fully concealed in our trench and lying in wait for the German sniper to move onto the bridge and make for his nest. But the night passed and dawn broke through our binoculars, and finally we looked at each other. “Go back?” Kostia asked, because the German wouldn’t move on his nest now, in the light of day. I envisioned Lyonya’s dugout, the potbellied stove, the mess tin of hot potatoes and stew he’d put down for me while I peeled out of my uniform. The compress he’d prepare for the still-healing scar on my back.
I shook my head, looking across the ravine at the bridge. “I’m staying until we bag him.”
“I’ll keep watch till midmorning. You sleep.”
I hesitated to curl against Kostia the way I usually did, but my winter uniform—thick underwear, tunic, padded vest and trousers, overcoat, white camouflage smock—didn’t do much for warmth beyond keeping you from freezing to death. I curled into Kostia’s back and slept till he woke me and took my place, alternating through the day until the sun fell again, the shrinking moon rose, and we were both back at our binoculars. Come on, you Kraut bastard.
Another long, empty night. Another morning alternating sleep and watch, relieving ourselves in an empty can as the other politely turned away. Lyonya would be ripping the floor of his dugout to bits pacing, I thought, but I couldn’t abandon the stakeout—not yet. “What if he’s dead?” I asked as another midnight rolled over the ravine. “What if our side finished the sniper off in the forest somewhere after he retreated from his last sortie here?”
Kostia passed me a pinch of dry tea and a lump of sugar wrapped in foil. Chew the sugar and the tea together, it helped keep you awake on a long stakeout, and without pouring tea into your belly that you’d have to pee out into a can. “You want him badly,” my partner observed. “More than the usual target.”
“Yes.” I thought about why for a half hour or so. Kostia and I could have four-sentence conversations that stretched over hours; there was no need to hurry in a sniper’s nest. “I don’t have any ridiculous notion that what snipers do is unfair,” I said finally. “The Hitlerites invaded and then started exterminating us—we’re stopping them however we can. They already have the upper hand in so many ways. So I don’t have time for anyone who says firing on them from the shadows might not be fair.”