The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [30]
During our rest, Zlee and I had removed the bullets from one of our clips and reversed the heads. It was something Bücher had taught us. With the flatter back end of the slug at the front of the projectile, the bullet mashes and tumbles as soon as it hits. The Germans used these to penetrate firing plates, and we figured we’d be shooting at moving targets and so would have to aim for the body, which meant that even if the shot hit wide, it would still tear up the chest cavity and be lethal.
I was shooter when the deserters emerged, and I got the first one in my sights, waited as he loped and tucked, and then led him to the right, exactly where he was supposed to step, and shot him between the shoulder blades. When he went down, the other one stopped and looked back. I could see his face as though I were looking through a mirror: young, filthy from not having washed in a long time, eyes big with fear. I aimed for his head, but in that split second I realized that he wouldn’t stand in profile like that for long, and so I lowered the rifle as he spun back around, and fired. His arm seemed to whip out from the force of the turn and, when the bullet hit his shoulder, tore off his body and into the air. He dropped and screamed for one involuntary second, then lay motionless and quiet on the ground.
Light was barely discernible, a brief, shadowy dawn particular to the mountains. Zlee glassed the ground and said, “He’s still alive.”
I could hear the weak sounds of leaves and sticks crackling slowly, and said, “Let’s go.” He would bleed to death eventually, and there would be short-range artillery soon.
But Zlee said, “They’d have opened up by now. No one over there knows what’s going on. We have to finish this.”
So we left cover and moved out along a sap that barely came to shoulder height. I didn’t like being out in the open so close to morning. The Italians had snipers, too, and I was afraid Zlee was wrong, that someone over there was watching us, but we came to a place where the trench dead-ended against a tussle of roots and rocks, and we settled into that for a hide.
The near-quiet woods and the knowledge that I had failed to get my kill unnerved and fatigued me, so I handed Zlee the rifle. He took his time observing the wounded man. Two minutes, ten—I don’t know. His trigger finger moved slightly along the inside of the grasping groove like it was stroking a chin, and I whispered, “One hundred and fifty yards,” and noted a fluky breeze. Zlee adjusted slightly for it, then lay still and breathed slowly as he peered through the scope, and all I could think about was the light and what a shame it would be to get killed on a morning as beautiful as this one. Then Zlee drew the rifle in tight and fired.
From there, we continued north. The line broke and we bouldered over an exposed but high escarpment above the Soca, still running, so deep and strangely blue. High pressure along with the wind seemed to have settled over the entire valley, and I remembered that it was May. We came into a new sector just south of Plava and ranged among the mountains the Italians called the Three Saints, and which our armies held: Santo, San Gabriele, and San Daniele. That evening, a Croatian outfit shared with us their supper of pine-needle tea and gamey horse meat, and then paraded around two Italian deserters, whom they were going to shoot in the morning.
“You cold bastards shouldn’t get to have all the fun,” they said, laughing and a little drunk on wine they had found in the basement of an old church. We kept to ourselves after that and hiked and spotted from higher ground at intervals that suited us.
One night we camped near a small stream at the back of San Daniele so that our fire wouldn’t be detected. Artillery thumped slow but steady in the distance like the ouff of waves on a shore, and Zlee and I ate vodici we picked in those hills and boiled with our tea and talked about Pastvina,