Read Online Beautiful Assassin by Michael C. White - Free Book Online

number of us were in an underground bunker, the ceiling of which was reinforced with heavy timbers and several meters of earth against the Germans’ bombingruns. It was lit by several smoky lanterns that made the eyes burn. Zoya held the Mauser and pretended she was the King of Death sneaking up on me, taking exaggerated steps, like a character in a dumb show. She was quite the little actress. The other soldiers laughed heartily at her antics. Even I couldn’t help but smile, this despite the fact that the image of the German continued to sit uneasily in my thoughts. I kept seeing his blue eyes staring at me, his whispering that name to me. Of course, I hadn’t told Zoya about any of that. The fact that she hadn’t even seen my shot didn’t stop her in the least from embellishing the story. She was always bragging about my marksmanship, which made me a bit uncomfortable. Though I worked hard at being a good soldier and was proud of my accomplishments as a sniper, I didn’t want my comrades to feel jealous about the acclaim I’d received, especially from the higher-ups.
    “The kraut comes walking toward the sergeant and realizes he’s fucked,” Zoya explained. She’d come to the unit a simple country girl, modest and plainspoken, in some ways as pious as a nun. But now, especially in front of the others, she swore like a fishwife. With me, though, she was still the same innocent girl. “And the German takes to his heels. The sergeant here”—she glanced over at me, winking—“puts a round in the kraut’s back from three hundred meters. Three hundred meters, without a scope!”
    “She exaggerates,” I said. “Not a third that distance.”
    “It’s the God’s truth,” pleaded Zoya, crossing herself.
    And so it went.
    Over the next several days, each time she would retell it, the difficulty of the shot as well as the distance grew. Nonetheless, the troops enjoyed hearing the story about the killing of the German, and so I thought, let her tell her story. They could use some good news for a change. There was a collective sigh of relief that the King of Death could kill no more. It was as if we’d won a great battle, instead of defeating just one stinking fascist. Several of the other snipers in the unit came up to me to offer their congratulations.
    “Good shooting, Sergeant,” said a young man named Cheburko, who came from Donetsk after that city fell to the Germans. There wasamong the other snipers and myself a friendly sort of competition. We joked and chided one another, playfully bragging among ourselves of our exploits, the difficulty of certain shots, the number of our kills. In the first months of the war, when I’d started to make a name for myself as a sniper, some of them, I must say, begrudged my success. What does a woman know about sniping , I knew they sneered behind my back. But as time went on, most grew at first to accept, then to respect, me. Among snipers there is a certain camaraderie, as among members of a football squad.
    “Thank you, comrade,” I said. “Our team was successful.”
    “What team?” scoffed Zoya. “I didn’t do a thing. It was all the sergeant’s doing. Such shooting you would not believe.”
    Later, Yuri Sokur, the company medic, tended to the laceration along the back of my scalp.
    “I guess congratulations are in order, Sergeant,” he said to me. Yuri was a small, wiry man with a pinched and contemplative face that reminded one of a very brooding monkey. Before the war, he’d been an undertaker, and with his knowledge of the body they had sent him for medical training. He was known for his poor bedside manner, perhaps owing to the fact that his previous patients weren’t able to complain very much. But for some reason he liked me, looked out for me like an older brother.
    “You have yourself a nasty wound,” he told me as he cleaned and began stitching the cut.
    “Just a scratch,” I replied.
    “Scratch nothing. You could have a fractured skull