Beautiful Assassin Read online

  “The sun will be in his eyes,” I had said this morning.

  “But if you’re spotted, you cannot get out of it.”

  “I won’t be spotted. He’s a clever one, this German, and I have to outfox him.”

  Zoya straightened and turned to face me. I could feel her gray eyes fixing me even in the darkness.

  “This is madness. You take too many risks, Tat’yana Levchenko.” When it was just the two of us, she still called me by name, though I had by now been promoted to sergeant. I didn’t mind. We were good friends as well as comrades. The fighting had brought us close in ways that only danger and the letting of blood can. During brutally cold winter nights, when we were in a foxhole, we sometimes used to sleep in each other’s arms for warmth. Other times, when I would make a difficult shot she would throw her arms around me and kiss me on the cheek. So I usually permitted such familiarity, especially when we were alone.

  “We are at war,” I said. “Everything we do is a risk.”

  “But you take too many.”

  “Wait here then,” I told her, picking up my rifle to leave.

  “Has all the talk gone to your head?” she said.

  I turned on her and said sharply, “That will be enough, Corporal.” I had only recently been promoted to sergeant and wasn’t used to pulling rank on her. For months as corporals, we’d worked well as a sniper team, sharing the demands and discomforts and dangers of our profession—sweating under the hot summer sun, freezing in the snow and cold of winter, shivering in the rain, many times coming within a hairs-breadth of catching a sniper bullet. And always taking equal credit for the kills. Sometimes, however, friendship had to take a backseat to duty, to the necessity of command. Besides, I knew the potential danger I was courting, and yet I wanted so very much to get this German, and I was willing to do almost anything, risk anything. But I couldn’t permit Zoya to sacrifice her life for my prideful need for vengeance.

  She picked up the bulky Degtyaryov automatic and the ammo pouches and started to follow me.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I am coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “But we are a team, Sergeant.”

  “Not this time.”

  She shook her head in annoyance. “Well, you’d better take this,” she said, offering up her own canteen. I tried to refuse it, but Zoya was adamant, so I accepted it with thanks.

  As I turned to leave, she touched my wrist. “Be careful, Tat’yana. This German has a powerful gift.” More of her superstition. Still, it unnerved me a bit.

  “He’s just a man,” I replied. “And like any man, he can be killed.”

  “So far no one has. Watch yourself,” she said, getting in the last word.

  The notion that this kraut was something more than an ordinary man had begun to spread through our lines. Like a fever it had permeated our troops, undermining our spirit. But then, realizing these could be my last words to Zoya, I softened my tone: “Don’t worry. I shall be careful, little mother.”

  I crawled through the cemetery until I reached the tree. Quietly, I started climbing it, my rifle slung over my shoulder. I got into position, remained motionless, and waited for the dawn. From there, as the darkness melted slowly away into the folds and creases of the valley, I scoped the territory to the north, searching for some sign of the German, a clue as to his position. Some movement. The glint from a gun barrel. A portion of the landscape that had been disturbed from the previous day—a branch that had been moved, a section of overturned earth, a piece of wood that didn’t look natural. As clever as these Germans were, the one thing they lacked was patience. They had the impulsiveness of spoiled children, the privileged sort who’d grown up in luxury and were used to having their every desire met instantly. Also, from the tree I had the advantage of the sun over my shoulder, which meant he had it in his eyes, at least until noon, when the tables would slowly be turned. I hoped to catch it flashing off his scope as he searched for me. I was excited by the prospect of getting him, of having my comrades cheer me when I returned to our lines. Yes, I must admit that I looked forward to that moment as an athlete does to the laurel crown of victory. And yet I knew when the moment of truth came, I would have to still my heart, keep my thoughts, my pride, my burning vengeance under control. I wouldn’t pull the trigger until I was sure to send him to his Valhalla.

  You see, in that strange communion that develops between snipers, this German and I had come to know the other, each one’s habits and instincts, the other’s preferences and idiosyncrasies. For instance, I knew that he liked to scope the terrain right to left, instead of the other way around, as most snipers did. That he sometimes took up positions in what would appear to be the most obvious, and therefore the least likely. That he had a tendency to shoot too quickly, which resulted in a wounded target rather than a kill. That he preferred flashy head shots to the safer torso strikes that most snipers aimed for. We had been playing a kind of cat and mouse game for the past several days, of move and countermove, a complicated dance. Before this day, he had fired at me several times, barely missing me once at twilight when I was changing my socks, soaked from a day of rain. And one time I had squandered a difficult but clearly possible shot at five hundred meters. Zoya had spotted him hiding in a hollow tree trunk at the edge of the woods. In my eagerness to take him, I had jerked the trigger instead of “kissing” it, as my first shooting instructor in the Osoviakhim, Sergeant Tarasov, had termed it, and the Mosin-Nagant had shot high, as it had a tendency to do. The tree, I felt, would give me the edge I needed. I’d convinced myself that with my camouflage poncho, I could blend into my surroundings. Besides, I had one important advantage over him—patience. People in my unit told me I had the patience of a saint, though I doubt there are any saints in war. I would wait him out, I thought. I would let him make a mistake and then kill him. I could even picture the surprised look in his eyes as my bullet caressed his heart.

  But no sooner had the sun spilled over the mountainous country to the east than I’d begun to wonder if I myself had not made the first mistake. Had I convinced myself of the safety of the tree not because it was safe, but because I was beginning to think myself invincible? Perhaps Zoya had been right. Maybe all the talk about my successes—the 287 kills, the medals, surviving three wounds, the articles in the military newspaper, even those newspapers from as far away as Moscow—maybe all that had gone to my head. Maybe I’d acted out of pride, instead of cold calculation, as I normally did. It was cold calculation, you see, that had made me not only the sniper with the highest kill total in the entire southern front of the Red Army, but had kept me alive as well. Since the war began I had learned that the most important lesson of sniping wasn’t marksmanship, a technical skill; in fact, it had very little to do with one’s expertise with a gun. It was something inside, controlling one’s emotions. You could hate the Germans with all your heart and soul, but you had to kill them with dispassion, with a cool head and a steady finger. That was the key. You had to turn your hatred into ice.

  Still, I’d wanted this particular gitlerovets so badly. I burned to defeat him. Over the past week, he’d scored some two dozen kills against my comrades—dispatching machine gunners, a female medic, a mortar team, two officers, a cook, a radioman, even several wounded soldiers being evacuated to a field hospital. The Red Cross sign meant nothing to him. He killed without discriminating, as one would crush ants beneath his boot heel; he seemed almost to take a capricious delight in his selection of targets, not out of military necessity, but like some arrogant god striking down whom he wished simply to show that he could. But the one that disturbed me most was a fresh recruit from Kiev University, where I had been working on my thesis before the war. I’d spoken to him once or twice. A pleasant, boyish-faced youth named Gorobets. Bookish and retiring, he was studying philosophy. Like myself, he wanted to be an academic, to teach and write, to spend his evenings quietly pouring over books. Foolishly, he’d c
rawled out of the trenches to get a page of a letter that had blown away. The story went that it had been a letter from his sweetheart, and because he was so far back of the front lines and therefore believed himself in no danger, he’d gone over the breastworks to retrieve it. The German had killed him with a head shot from fifteen hundred meters. Which was, of course, utter nonsense. No one killed with a Mauser from that distance. It was impossible, even for someone as good as this German. The first time I’d heard the story back at camp it had been only a third that distance, but it had grown with each successive telling and with each soldier the German chalked up, as did his reputation among our troops. Some were beginning to call him Korol’ Smerti—the King of Death. He had begun to get under our soldiers’ skin, to plague their thoughts, their dreams. They would speak of him in those hushed and nervous tones little children use when talking of the buka hiding under their beds. In the evening, I could see the haunted look in their eyes as they discussed the troops he’d dispatched that day. Even my brave little Zoya had been affected. I thought if I could get him, it would put an end to such nonsense. They would see that these Germans were just men like any other. That they could be killed. That we could beat them eventually, and drive them from our soil.

  I thought I even knew this King of Death’s voice, could pick it out from the other Germans who called across the lines at night. Sometimes the Germans would call things across the divide of no-man’s-land between our two lines, hoping to trick us, to goad us, to undermine our morale. They were good at propaganda, these Aryans, good at getting into one’s head. With me it had started months back when my kill total had reached first one hundred, then two hundred. I began to get something of a reputation, not only on my own side but on theirs as well. Somehow they’d learned my name. It wasn’t a hard thing, finding out my identity. Perhaps they got it from a tongue, what we called a captured soldier, or from one of the army newsletters that had fallen into their hands. Some of the things the Germans called were of a flirtatious nature, only what a brash Ukrainian boy back home might have said to me. “Tat’yana Levchenko, why don’t you come over here,” they’d say. “I have some schnapps and we can get to know each other.” Their cockiness made me almost smile in spite of myself. Others, though, called out crude epithets, threats or taunts, aimed at provoking me into acting rashly and giving away my position. “You had better keep out of our way, Flintenweib”—“gun woman,” the term the Germans used, part contempt, part awe, for female snipers. “If we catch you, we will tear you into two hundred little pieces and scatter them to the winds.” Two hundred pieces—for the number of Germans I had at the time tallied. Once or twice, I’d heard a voice that for some unknown reason, I assumed to be that of the King of Death himself. He’d call out in crude Russian, “Put down your gun, Tat’yana, and I let you live. You can be my shlyukha.” His whore. But I never let him—or whoever it was—get to me. I never lost my temper. Let them say what they would, I thought. I would let my gun speak for me.

  Still, it was sometimes hard to ignore them, the personal things they said. Occasionally they would call out about one’s mother or father, even one’s children. Those despicable bastards would even stoop to that. They were good at finding a person’s weakness. “How are your little ones, Tat’yana Levchenko? Are they getting enough to eat?” And, “What sort of mother leaves her children alone to go off and fight?” I knew they did this to other women soldiers too, said things of a general nature to make them feel guilty for going off to war. But unlike me, most of the women soldiers were actually unmarried, didn’t even have families. That didn’t stop the Germans. Of course, I realized the krauts knew nothing about my little girl. Nothing at all. How could they? Nonetheless, when I heard such things, they were like a dagger in my heart. If I could, I’d have gladly killed them with my bare hands, slowly, painfully, taking pleasure in it.

  There, caught in my apple tree, I decided I would just have to remain still and wait for darkness—some eight hours hence. The bright day stretched out flat and thin and brittle, each second exaggerated, seeming to last an hour. My watch had been damaged by shrapnel several days earlier, so I had to estimate the time by the sun’s passage. I picked out a gravestone below and marked the movement of its shadow across the ground.

  By midday it was scorching. I felt the sweat soaking my shirt and tunic, running down my back. A bee buzzed near my head, drawn by the sweet fragrance of last season’s apples rotting below. I watched an ant crawl up my sleeve, across my chest, onto the skin of my neck. Then I could feel it moving down between my breasts, tickling me, teasing me, as if knowing it could do whatever it pleased with impunity. A little German sympathizer, I thought to myself. Of course, I dared not move to crush it. To do so could spell death, so I bit on my lower lip to create a pain to neutralize the other. In the distance there was the sporadic pock…pock of small arms fire, the occasional tat-tat-tat of automatic weapons, but other than that the day was eerily still. For weeks we’d heard that the Germans were getting ready to attack, a final offensive to take the city. Supposedly they were bringing up reinforcements, two more divisions, as well as tanks and heavy artillery for the last thrust that would push us into the sea. The fine spring day unfolded like a ripe flower raising its head toward the sun. Now and then I caught a whiff of salt in the air from the sea just a few kilometers to my back. It would have been a wonderful day if not for the war.

  When a second shot didn’t follow the first for what I estimated was four hours, maybe more, I began to wonder if the danger I was in was real or imagined. Perhaps he didn’t have a clear shot after all. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he take it? Or maybe he hadn’t even spotted me. Maybe the first shot wasn’t even his, just a stray that happened to come close. It was, after all, a battlefield. I wasn’t the only object of their guns.

  My right leg had gone numb, so I chanced shifting my position ever so slightly. I moved one foot on the branch below, started to shift my thigh. That’s when the next bullet thudded into the tree trunk: whht. I could feel its impact through the wood, a firm tapping against my cheek, a knock on the door of my mortality. And then another—whht. And two more after that. Whht, whht. The last grazed the bark at an angle, flying past the tree but spitting fragments of wood into my face. Was the German simply toying with me? Did he intend to savor his advantage for a while, prolong my agony before dispatching me?

  Moving my head cautiously, I saw the last bullet’s mark along the side of the trunk. It came from a Mauser 98k, the standard weapon of my enemy. The Mauser was bolt action, had a five-round clip, and shot a 197-grain, steel-jacketed bullet at 840 meters per second, if loaded with high-velocity machine-gun ammo, as I knew this King of Death did. The rifle had an effective kill range of five hundred meters, not as good as our Soviet rifle, but with a scope and in competent hands the Mauser could kill well beyond that distance. And this kraut was much more than competent. He was good. He was very good. I studied the angle the last shot had made along the bark, and using its trajectory I followed it to a point about three hundred meters east of where I’d previously assumed him to be. There the land fell abruptly away toward what had been a quarry. It ran for a half kilometer along the Soviet right flank. I’d passed it when our Second Company had been ordered to fall back and take up positions along this high ground overlooking the city. So, I thought. That’s where you are. He was moving clockwise, to my right, getting out of the sun’s rays and trying to outflank me, to put the sun in my eyes and get in position for a clear shot. And yet, if I kept moving to maintain the trunk between us, soon I’d be exposed to other German snipers and machine gunners to the north and west. I was vulnerable one way or the other.

  Time was running out for me. I felt I had to come up with a plan quickly, before I became a sitting duck. Finally, I decided what I must do. I’d tempt him into shooting again and then pretend that he’d hit me and fall from the tree. This strategy, I knew, had only a slim chance for success, but it was better than waiting to be killed. I w
orked things out, trying to design my “death” so that it would look real. When I fell I wanted to make sure I was facing in the direction of the German’s position, and that my rifle landed within reach. Cautiously, I removed the scope, not wanting it to get damaged, and put it in my rucksack, hanging over my shoulder. I also had to make sure to avoid hitting any branches on the way down. That might spin me out of control and I could very well break my neck. But at the same time my fall had to appear natural to be convincing—that I’d been hit and killed.

  I took off my forage cap and placed it on the end of my bayonet and extended it ever so slowly just a little ways beyond the trunk, just enough so as to lure the German into thinking it was still sitting atop my head. He didn’t disappoint me. In a moment the bullet’s impact flung my cap backward into the leaves. As if hit, I released my grip on the tree and let myself go, plunging earthward.

  I slammed into the ground, the back of my head striking painfully against something hard. Luckily, my right side took the brunt of the fall, so that it was diffused along the entirety of my body. Still, the impact knocked the wind out of me, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe because of a stabbing pain in my side. I thought perhaps I’d broken some ribs. I could also feel a hot wetness inching down along my scalp behind my right ear. I didn’t think that I’d been hit, but I couldn’t be sure. Fortunately for me, the German, who was down below in the valley, didn’t have a clear shot of where I now lay on the ground; otherwise, he’d have put another round in me just to be certain. If the tables had been turned I’d have done nothing less. I figured he’d probably come closer to make certain. So I had to lie perfectly still and pretend I was dead. That was my only chance.