“Like a wart. Or a tumor,” Halévy said.
He might have been right. Vaclav was too stubborn to care. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t have wound up in the army of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile to begin with. He gave Halévy a gesture that, to the American Internationals, meant everything was fine. To someone from Central Europe, it implied something else. Halévy chuckled. He never got stuffy about rank. And if he weren’t a stubborn anti-Fascist himself, he wouldn’t have ended up in Spain, either.
Out Vaclav went before dawn the next morning. If he caught pneumonia lying in a shell hole that slowly filled with water … then he did, that was all. He hadn’t yet. He’d come down with the trots from eating bad food a few times, but that was about all. He didn’t know anybody who’d fought for a while without having that happen to him.
On a day like this, he could get closer to the Nationalists’ lines than he did most of the time. They wouldn’t be able to spot him through the rain. How much he’d be able to see was another interesting question, though. He’d replaced the cardboard overhangs on his binoculars and rifle sight with ones he carved from scraps of wood, but he’d still be peering through the rain himself.
Strips of torn burlap and bits of foliage attached to his uniform and helmet and rifle broke up his outline. When he found a good hiding place, he’d rub mud on his cheeks and on his hands so he wouldn’t show up against the background.
Nobody had taught him any of this business. He’d learned it or made it up as he went along. He wondered why no sharp-eyed German had killed him in France before he figured out what was what. A couple of them had tried-he knew that. He was still here, while the Fritzes’ kin back in the Vaterland must have got wires to let them know their loved ones had died for the Führer.
Come to think of it, this morning he might need to do his face, but his hands would get plenty filthy crawling to his hidey-hole. He found a good one, and improved it with his entrenching tool so the water ran down to the bottom and didn’t pool right under him.
By the time the gloomy day broke, he was ready for whatever might happen. He lay very stilclass="underline" he might almost have been a forgotten corpse himself. A sparrow certainly thought he was. The stupid little bird landed less than a meter from his face and started hopping around looking for seeds or bugs or whatever else it could pop into its beak.
“Hey, bird!” he said. “What d’you think you’re doing, bird?” He spoke quietly. He thought it was the motion of his lips rather than the noise he made that scared the sparrow. Whatever it was, the bird let out a horrified chirp and took off as if it had a 109 on its tail. God tracked falling sparrows, didn’t He? Well, here was one going up for Him to watch.
A few Nationalists started shooting at the Republican line. Each of them fired slowly, taking a long time to work the bolt on his rifle and load a fresh round. They had orders to shoot, but they weren’t happy about them. Or, more likely, they hadn’t had their first slug of espresso yet, so they were only half awake.
He could have killed them. They were spending way too long up on the firing step, too. But they weren’t worth wasting ammunition on, not for a sniper like him. They weren’t worth giving away his position for, either. The small change of war, Vaclav thought.
Sanjurjo’s men would have been furious to know how he saw them. They were all heroes in their own minds. A lot of them truly were heroes. Spaniards didn’t even worry about chances no sane German or Czech would take. They were the small change of war even so.
He swung his binoculars a few centimeters to the right and squinted through them again. He suddenly paid close attention to what he saw there: a fellow with binoculars of his own was looking back at him. Jezek didn’t care for that, not even a little bit. He muscled his rifle over to bear on the Spaniard. Of itself, his right hand slid toward the trigger.
It wasn’t just that the bastard might be searching for him. Anybody with binoculars was likely to be an officer. An officer might be worth killing. And an officer looking out from the forward trench would be easy to kill, too. From here, Vaclav figured he wouldn’t have much trouble killing somebody over there with a Mauser.
Nationalist officers often painted their rank badge in gold on the front of their helmets. Part of the point of being a Nationalist officer was showing that you were. They were as aggressively boastful as Spanish Republicans were aggressively egalitarian.
He had trouble making out how big a wheel this brave fool was. The rain obscured whatever emblem he had above the outthrust brim of his German-style headgear. It did seem to have a lot of gold, though. That seemed promising, at least if you were a sniper.
The Nationalist lowered the field glasses and turned to say something to someone Vaclav couldn’t see. He could see the man’s round face and heavy jowls, his gray mustache, and the pouches under his eyes.
“Fuck me,” the Czech whispered as he quickly centered the crosshairs on the target’s head. He didn’t know that was who he thought it was. He didn’t know, no, but the shot was worth taking anyhow.
Stay in routine, he told himself, and he did. Target lined up? Yes. A couple of deep breaths, in and out. Don’t hurry. Don’t worry. If you hurry and worry, you’ll miss. Don’t think about who it might be. Don’t think at all. Just aim and … shoot.
He didn’t jerk the trigger. He brought his right index finger back hard enough to take up the slack, and then to fire the piece. The antitank rifle bellowed. Recoil slammed against his shoulder. Yes, he’d added to his collection of bruises. No, he hadn’t done anything stupid like breaking his collarbone.
He hadn’t done anything stupid like missing, either. If you dropped a boulder on a watermelon from the top of a five-story building, you might get an explosion of red mist and gunk like the one a fat, highvelocity, armor-piercing slug produced when it slammed into some luckless soldier’s temple. Down went the Nationalist officer. He’d twitch for a minute or two, but he was already dead just the same.
Now-had the assholes in the trenches over there spotted the flash through the rain? Did they know where it came from? If they did, how excited would they get about it?
He didn’t need long to realize it hadn’t been some overage, overweight major of artillery. The Nationalists started running every which way. Through his field glasses, he saw that they started pointing every which way, too. He breathed a little easier then. No, they didn’t know which hole he was hiding in. They wouldn’t start throwing mortar bombs this way or send out a couple of squads of pissed-off soldiers after him.
Rifle fire from the Nationalists’ trenches picked up. Machine guns started their malevolent snarl. The enemy artillery bombarded the Republican lines. Wet and chilly in his shell hole, Vaclav lay without moving and began to think he really might have done it.
Peggy Druce fixed coffee and oatmeal for herself. While the coffee perked, she turned on the radio. It was eight o’clock straight up. She could catch the morning news while she got breakfast ready.
Well, she could after they tried to sell her soap and toothpaste and canned pork and beans. “A little bit less pork for the duration,” the announcer said, “but just as much delicious goodness!” Undoubtedly just as much per can, too. They wouldn’t lower the price because they’d cheapened the mix. That would be un-American.
NBC’s three familiar chimes rang out. “Here is the news,” a different announcer said. “American bombers gave Midway Island another pasting last night. Three planes are reported missing. One ditched in the Pacific, and most of the crew have been rescued.”
Three planes were reported missing. That was what he said. Most people would take it to mean the United States had lost only three planes. If Peggy hadn’t got stuck in war-torn Europe, she would have taken it the same way. But all the warring countries over there told as many lies as they thought they could get away with, and then another one for luck. Three planes reported lost could mean any number down in flames.