Another Green World (42 page)

The chubby engineer grunted. This last was a term for Germans of fighting age who, until now, had passed the war on the home front, mostly in office jobs. The popular epitome of such people, given currency by the likes of Ehrenburg, was the nameless Berlin bureaucrat signing orders for mass deportations.

“So, you've got an SS division with German commanders, decent supplies and foreign troops flanked by a green Wehrmacht division with a core of veteran staff officers and NCOs. On the face of it, a textbook opportunity for exploitation.”

“What textbook would that be?” wondered one of the Division men.

Butler hoped Seryoshka was prepared for this. Red Army doctrine was essentially conservative—designed by geniuses, so the joke went, to be carried out by idiots. It favored the broad frontal assault, prepared by heavy artillery fire and conducted by an overwhelming mass of politically motivated foot soldiers. Such innovations as the Blitzkrieg were scorned as inherently Fascistic. Which did not, however, prevent Soviet officers from admiring a man like Patton—this despite the general's widely reputed anti-Communism. More than one Red Army tank commander had confided to Butler that he hoped to fight against Patton someday.

“That book,” Seryoshka said coolly, “would be Voroshilov's account of the Civil War. He writes of a cavalry tactic known as
probing for the fault. ‘
The enemy's weakness lay not in lack of arms or men, but in lack of proletarian unity. We taught ourselves to exploit this.' “

They all stared at him. The yurt went quiet except for the sizzle of green wood in the tiny
burzhuika
stove. Without warning, Bo, the signals man, threw back his head and laughed. Then they were all laughing.

“Voroshilov!” Bo declared, toasting with an imaginary cup.

Meaning, Butler guessed, they'd decided Seryoshka was lying. Had Voroshilov, that old fool, even
written
a book? If so, who would want to read it! But never mind. It might be a lie, but it was a grand lie—a Russian lie. The kind of thing a Red Army man prefers, most days, to the truth.

“So we strike the hinge,” said the senior ops specialist, once things had settled down. It had the resonance of a ruling. “For that we need current
intelligence. Not many line-crossers lately. Anyone want to go over there and grab a tongue?”

They all became serious again. Probably because they understood what a tongue was, and what grabbing one entailed. Butler did not. But he liked the phrase, he jotted it down in his notebook.

“Not a Bulgarian,” said the signals man.

“No. A German.”

“That means an officer,” the engineer said thoughtfully. “At least a sergeant.”

Ops nodded. “It will be difficult.”

“I'll go.” Seryoshka slapped Butler on the shoulder. “You come, too. This will make, what do you say? Good material.”

It sounded like one of those plans that cannot possibly succeed. But to hear Seryoshka tell it, such operations were commonplace.

The first task was to cross the death strip, the two-to-three-hundred-meter gap between the forward positions of the opposing armies. This area, a narrow open valley with woods on either side, had been mined by the Germans, employing a variety of explosive devices triggered unpredictably; they were very clever about such things. On moonlit nights, Russian sappers would sneak out and clear paths through the minefield, marking them with strips of cloth. On other nights, and often the same nights, German engineers would sneak out and move the cloth strips around, bury new mines and sometimes engage in sharp, hand-to-hand engagements with their Russian counterparts. It was a dangerous game but it passed the time between offensives. And it was necessary, from the Soviet point of view, because to take the pressure off, to just leave the mines lying there, would be as good as telling the Germans, We are not coming yet, you can relax for a while.

The chubby Russian engineer was called Lyubov. He insisted on joining them, though Seryoshka tried to talk him out of it. There was a fourth man, a Chechen, whom Seryoshka had known in Stalingrad.
Light on his feet, you can never hear him coming—he moves like a ghost.

They waited until ten o'clock and then headed out, first in a crouch and then down on all fours. It wasn't dark; it was never dark with all that snow. The Chechen went first with Lyubov whispering at his heels: “That way— no, to your right. Stay away from that bush there. Now straight through.” Butler expected at every instant to hear the hiss of bullets; he could practically feel them whipping through his jacket, burning channels in his skin.

Until you do something like this, you don't think much about the precise location of each of your extremities, or how far up in the air your backside might be at any given moment. In that respect, it was educational.

Seryoshka's breathing came from somewhere close behind him. Butler had expected to be assigned the last position himself.
No. If there is an ambush, it will likely come from the rear. They let you go by, then shoot you in the back.

The crossing took forever, then suddenly it was over. Now they were on the German side, in sparse woodland which qualitatively was no different from the woods across the valley, but which felt alien, witchy, crawling with monsters. Any one of these shadows…

What you need to understand, Seryoshka had explained, is the nature of a front line. This isn't the Great War, we're not talking about trenches with cannon fodder lined up in neat little rows. These units are spread out along a wide sector, the leading edge is lightly manned—it's a web of forward observation posts and dug-in sentry positions, with patrols moving between them. If it were tighter than that, we could open up with mortar fire and, boom, there goes the opposition. The other thing is, what is on a sentry's mind? Imagine: it's the middle of the night, it's cold, you're awake while everyone else is sleeping, you're assigned to a certain area, after a few watches it becomes as familiar as your old schoolyard. You keep your eyes and ears open, but the truth is, you don't expect anyone to be out there. Not really. You know if you hear a noise in the forest, it's probably some animal. Or it's the sergeant, coming to check on you. If you catch a glimpse of something, flickering among the trees—well, soldiers are always seeing phantoms. Every battlefield is haunted. You've seen them, haven't you, Sammy, the phantoms?

Butler was surprised. But yes. Yes in fact, he had seen them. Figures with no particular features, yet as insistently present as the people in a dream.

So: there you are. It's no great difficulty to grab a tongue. The trick is picking the right one. You want a tongue with something to flap about.

Advancing at a crouch through the German-held woods, Seryoshka pulled the cover off his sniper rifle. If such a thing could be an object of beauty, then this Czech-made Moisan Nagant with its big-eyed scope, its oiled ashwood stock and burnished barrel was beautiful. Gently he loosened the sling and looped it around his neck. He unclasped the bayonet and handed this, hilt first, to Butler. One edge of its blade was a row of shiny teeth.

The Chechen moved silently into the darkness. Lyubov followed, not so
silently. Butler's limbs began to tremble and his breath took on a rattling sound; he prayed it wasn't as loud as it seemed to be. A minute passed, and another. He lost all sense of direction; stars glimmered through the leafless canopy. While Butler was looking up, one of his feet got tangled in something, a vine maybe. He bent to work it loose. A muffled sound came from not far away, as though someone were trying to speak. This was followed a few moments later by a soft thump and some crunching of undergrowth. Then it was quiet.

Breaking free, his heart pounding, Butler moved to where he thought the sound had come from. He found his three companions kneeling around something. He didn't want to look. No, he needed to—it was, as Seryoshka had said, material. The man lying in a gray uniform jacket, bulked out with layers beneath, was obviously dead. The Chechen wiped his knife clean on the man's sleeve.

“The CP is over there,” he whispered. “Maybe three, four hundred meters. That's what he said.”

“Do you think he was telling the truth?” said Lyubov. There was a look of childish amazement in his dark little eyes.

“It's a little late to ask now.” The Chechen shrugged. “Anyway, he was trying to call out. I didn't have any choice.”

What followed seemed endless. They crept from one tree to the next, kept still for a while, moved again. Twice, they came upon sentry posts. Each time they retraced their steps, moved sideways for a distance, then forward again in a new direction, orienting themselves by compass. Butler got the feeling the night was slipping away from them, any minute the sun would start to rise. At last they came in sight of their goal: a dugout with a slanting roof, camouflaged with leaves and netting, whose lower purlin ran flush with the forest floor. There was light enough, by a waning moon, to make out a thin stream of smoke curling from a pipe bored through the timbers.

There was no need for talking; this was what they had planned for, everyone's role was already assigned. Butler's was to stay put and keep watch. Lyubov likewise, a distance away. The two of them, at this crucial stage, were extra bodies; the delicate work was best left to experts. Seryoshka pressed his rifle into Butler's hands, trading it for the bayonet. Then he was gone, one shadow among many. Butler peered around.
Keep your eyes moving and your body still.

Experimentally, he raised the rifle to his shoulders, admiring the way its mass was balanced. He swept it in an arc, sighting through the scope. At
high magnification, the woods looked brighter. He caught a glimpse, he thought, of Lyubov, half hidden behind a tree.

No. Not Lyubov. The uniform was wrong. The figure, approaching Butler at an oblique angle, seemed very close, but that was an illusion, an artifact of sniper's optics. He lowered the weapon and now could see both men, Lyubov and the other one. Lyubov was looking in the wrong direction; the enemy was coming up behind him.

Butler felt something he took for panic. Only it couldn't be panic because at its center was an unnatural calm. What it was, he realized, was simple confusion.

This very situation had been covered in their plans. Butler knew exactly what was expected of him: he must do
nothing—
and that was an order— except stay where he was and keep quiet. If Lyubov were sniffed out, that was for Lyubov alone to deal with. Let him kill the enemy soldier, if he could, or be killed himself. Even let the enemy soldier sound an alarm. The vital thing was, let the problem stay where it was; do not spread it any further, do not involve other members of the team, do not get involved yourself. We will each have to manage as best we can, if anything goes wrong—
our only advantage, and it is little enough, will be the enemy's uncertainty.
The plans were explicit; there was no questioning their terrible logic.

But now, confronted by the reality of the thing, Butler wasn't sure he could do what he needed to. It had never been his way to merely watch— perhaps that was why he'd never soared to great heights as a journalist. He pressed his eye to the scope again. With his thumb he found the safety.

Through the lens, he watched the sentry freeze—he must have sighted Lyubov—and then slowly reach for his Mauser. But the rifle was strapped to his back, the sentry had to grope for it, there was a dry sound of leather rubbing against cloth. Lyubov turned. The other man had a grip on his rifle now and was drawing the bolt. A queer noise came from Lyubov's throat, like a scream he almost managed to choke off. The enemy took aim but Lyubov pulled the trigger first—a single shot from the pistol Butler hadn't noticed in his hand. The blast was like thunder in the sleeping forest.

If every second that followed was the frame of a motion picture, then it seemed to Butler he was moving in slow motion through a full-length Hollywood epic. In some frames there were shouts, flashing lights, rapid-fire
concussions. In others, the screen filled with a close-up of one of his comrades. There wasn't much dialogue, mostly curses and orders bellowed in Russian, German, Bulgarian or some mongrel soldier's argot. One memorable sequence featured Seryoshka charging like a madman across the mined valley floor with a bundle slung over his shoulder like a sack of laundry, the scene lit by flare bursts overhead and machine-gun tracer rounds. Most of it, though, was a chaotic montage, a Dadaist plunge into the fractured madness of modern war, like Picasso's
Guernica
reworked as an
avant-garde
horror show.

It seemed no more realistic, no more believable, when the scene changed to the
politruk'
s yurt, lit now in a blue-gray wash that stood for dawn. Lyubov lay on a cot, bleeding from a gunshot in the upper thigh: the wound of Anfortas, lord of the Waste Land. Seryoshka sat at the table smoking
papirosi
that were said to come from the ops chief ‘s personal stock. The Chechen was unaccounted for.
Dead, if he's fortunate.

Butler was scarcely aware of his own position in the yurt, nor of how long he'd been there. His thoughts were disordered. It was worse than seeing phantoms. For six years now he had been writing the story of this war, starting with the dress rehearsal in Spain. Suddenly he was part of the story himself, a character. From here, every word he'd written seemed untrue. Not a grand Russian lie, like
War and Peace.
Just off the mark, somehow. Too dry, too weak. Too rational.

Propped beside the stove, a glass of vodka in his trembling hand, sat a young blond man in a Waffen-SS uniform, his collar insignia identifying him as an Untersturmführer. His name tag read Knappe. But for everyone else—Seryoshka, the
politruk
, Lyubov, or the soft-spoken intelligence officer who sat very close to the prisoner, from time to time refilling his glass—this man's name and rank, all the details of his individual identity, were irrelevant.

To them, this was only a tongue. And it was talking.

MID-NOVEMBER 1944