The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [43]
When it came—from the south this time and the shooter in the valley—I had Zlee over my shoulder just as I was about to drop down an embankment for cover. I felt the force of the bullet as it slammed into his side at the height of my neck and I fell off balance and rolled toward a cliff and tried to grab at the ground with one hand while holding on to Zlee’s body with the other, but our weight gathered too much speed and momentum on the incline, and as I approached the sheer edge, I grabbed a scrub pine growing from a crack in a formation of rock and let Zlee’s body tumble down into the ravine.
I HUNG ON TO THAT TREE FOR SOME TIME, WONDERING IF I shouldn’t let go, let go and remain with my brother, rather than having to trek again through the mountains and snows of a hostile and desolate country, until my arms began to grow tired and that weariness shook me hard, and I found the will and enough strength to swing my legs and mantle my body up onto the ledge. I sat there, willing grief and sorrow as the sun began to bend to the west and I felt a chill, knew that there was no time now for grief, and realized that I had lost my hat and gloves, canteen, field glasses, and rucksack, and could find only my knife still sheathed where I kept it tied to my leg.
In my mind, I climbed with stealth and nothing but a good coat and that knife to the side of the shooter to the north, caught him by surprise, and slit his throat. Then I walked back south to where his twin waited for him, approached from behind the boulders that gave him shelter, whispered “Boom,” and in the confusion slid into his hide and thrust my knife—still soaked with the blood of his comrade—into his chest. And with two rifles and two days’ rations, I hiked north and east—not west but east—back into the Karnische and through the lands of the empire, toward the only home Zlee had said he’d ever known, or wanted to know.
But I knew, too, that both shooters were long gone by now, not certain but convinced, perhaps, that I had been hit and fallen to my death. And so I waited for nightfall and retraced my steps back to Fort Cherle.
There was a full moon, but it was bitter cold. I wove some soft fir branches together to cover my head, and walked (when I could) with my bare hands thrust into my armpits. I risked being shot by the sentry if they had changed the password, but this seemed a small and ironic threat to me in the new dawn, and at the command “Halt!” I replied, “Don’t shoot,” then gave my name and rank and the password from three days before. There seemed some hesitation on the other side, until the men could see who I was by my uniform, and I was led like a prisoner into the fort.
I stood outside the iron door of Prosch’s office long enough to wish I had walked the other way until I could walk no farther, and then I was escorted inside. I was shivering from the cold, and Prosch, in my defeat, let me shiver.
“Our dummy took a bullet in the neck, just as planned, Corporal Vinich,” he said. “And when my sentry, the fool, stood to alert the gunners, he took a bullet in the head. Not as planned, Corporal Vinich.”
I tried to control my breathing while he paced.
“Corporal Pes?”
I said, “Dead, sir.”
“You leave your brother behind I see. And you disobey orders.”
I said that our orders were to hunt an enemy sharpshooter, not knowing that there were two. “But they knew,” I said. “About us they knew.”
Prosch walked slowly out from behind his desk, removed his sidearm—a gleaming German 9—and held it to my forehead. “Speak without being asked a direct question again, Corporal Vinich, and those words will be your last.”
We stood motionless and in silence like that as I waited for what he would do next, until Prosch holstered his weapon and turned back to face his wet stone wall.
“Make yourself useful,” he said to the wall. “Take two men from