He stepped away from the line of women lying on the snow. “All right. Commence firing.”

She waited for the moving silhouettes to come into sight, various German helmets and caps drawn on a string at the other end of the range. The simple soldiers were obvious and easy, but the high-value targets worth double points appeared for only an instant. She focused her attention on the area enclosed in her scope and moved the muzzle in a slight arc.

There was one. Bang. Another. Bang. She held back as the flat infantryman helmets passed, letting the other women dispatch them. Again, a high-peaked cap. Bang.

By the end of the session, she’d scored half a dozen officers, three machine gunners, and four ordinary Wehrmacht. Her high score won her a small bar of chocolate with her supper.

The next day they worked in teams, and Fatima was her spotter. Fatima swept the horizon with her binoculars. “Officer approaching from right. About two o’clock.”

“I see him.”

The cardboard figure stopped, then backed away to be replaced by two bucket helmets. “Crap, lost him. No, wait. I see the tip of a machine gun. It’s a nest. Take them out.”

Alexia fired twice and the cardboard figures fell over.

In the three hours, a long series of figures danced along the rim of the target trench, some slowly, some rapidly, their hats or guns or postures identifying them. When the instructor blew his whistle to end the exercise, Alexia’s team scored the highest.

“I wonder why officers wear tall, pointy caps,” Fatima mused. “If I was one, I’d want a nice flat one.”

“Swagger surpasses safety, I suppose,” Alexia murmured.

Nikolai Kulikov waited for them in the mess hall, his arms folded. His status as a survivor of Stalingrad and a student of the great marksman Vassily Zaitsev himself had earned him deference and respect, and some of the women were in awe of him. Alexia was more curious about Zaitsev, who was all but the patron saint of snipers, and after their ration of vodka had been passed around, she approached him.

“Comrade Sergeant. If I may. We want to be ready on that day when the first shots are real. What was it like for you?”

He poured himself a second vodka, to which, as an instructor, he was entitled, and stared at it as he swirled it around in the glass.

“My dear comrade. I hope you do not have the same experience. My first great battle was Stalingrad, and I can recall that first day, in September 1942, as if it were yesterday. We marched overland to the Volga, and already from afar we could see the city had a crimson sky over it, like an erupting volcano. Tiny black things swarmed in circles over it, and those were German planes dropping bombs, stoking the fire.”

He ran his finger around the rim of his vodka glass. “It was like we were marching toward hell. In an hour or so, when we actually were crossing the Volga, the burnt-out buildings were glowing inside, like monsters eating up our men. This time the little black figures running back and forth across the glow were soldiers, but we couldn’t tell if they were ours or theirs.” He stared into space for a moment.

“When we reached the shore, we dashed forward screaming ‘uh rah!’ to give ourselves courage, but a petrol storage tank nearby took a hit, exploded, and drenched us in fuel as we ran. We caught fire but kept running while we tore off our flaming hats and coats. The fact that we were already at full speed and reacted instantly saved us from burning to death. That’s your answer. My first hour in battle was running with screaming naked men into the inferno of Stalingrad.” He swallowed the rest of his vodka.

The women sat speechless at the tale, but Kulikov was obviously warmed up and had another one to tell.

“Every day, if we weren’t killed, we got better at our job. Once Zaitsev and I and two others were on Mamayev Hill. It was covered with corpses. Our job was to keep the Fritzes pinned down away from a spring, so they’d run out of water. But they beat us back so we couldn’t reach the spring either. Anytime someone, Soviet or German, crawled down to the spring with a bucket, he’d get shot. For three days we lay there parched, and it was unbearable.”

He paused for dramatic effect.

“Then Zaitsev remembered that the corpses all around us had canteens. We crawled out under cover and brought back a dozen of them. The water was old and not great, but it kept us going. The Germans never thought of it and kept trying to get to the spring, where we knocked them off one by one.”

“A good lesson, Comrade Major,” someone said. “To use our brains and not just our eyes.”

“Yeah, and to start out with a full canteen.” He snorted and strode from the mess hall.

Kalya watched him leave. “They keep telling us about Zaitsev, but my hero is Comrade Pavlichenko. She’s one of us.”

“Do you suppose the British and Americans have women snipers?” Sasha asked. “Or are they softer than we are?”

Alexia gave a faint shrug. “Could be. I only met that one American. Kind of soft, but with a spirit tough as any man’s.”

“Really? How do you know?”

“She partied all night with Stalin, and then she kissed me.”

* * *

On April 1, 1944, the Central Women’s School of Sniper Training graduated its second class of snipers, and fifty women carrying their Mozin-Nagant rifles fitted with PU scopes of 3.5 magnification marched past the reviewing stand.

Their instructors and senior government officials sat in a row before a huge red banner that the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union had presented to the school.

The parading women halted and the speeches began. Alexia barely listened and was already thinking of the next morning when she would be deployed to the 1st Belorussian Front Army under the command of General Rokossovsky. She would pack her small kit and march with the others with the same orders to the station to board a train to Novgorod.

There, at some point, she would be called upon to use her newly acquired skills, not to shoot holes through a painted cardboard cap, but to kill a living German point-blank. Father Zosima would be appalled.

Chapter Twelve

April 1944


“Come in.” Hopkins’s somewhat bored voice came through the door, and Mia let herself in.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I won’t take long.” She held out an envelope. “It’s my letter of resignation.”

He frowned consternation. “Good grief. Whatever for?” He took the envelope but held it in front of him without opening it. “Has anyone mistreated you? Is there some problem?”

“In fact, the problem is mine, sir. Not the job. I love it.”

“Then what’s the reason for this?” He laid the letter on his desk. “Unless it’s for a very grave matter, I can’t let you leave. You’re too important to the program, especially now, when I have to accompany the president on the campaign.”

Mia took a step back, unprepared for his reception. “Well, it’s precisely because of the campaign that I have to leave. You see, I was involved in an… um… indiscretion a year or so ago, before being hired. I thought it was all behind me, but it’s come back to haunt me.”

“An indiscretion. Has this anything to do with the death of your father? I thought the police had closed the case. Are you implicated in any way?”

Mia took a breath. “Not in the death. At least I don’t think so. It’s been months since my brother said the case had reopened, and no one from the police has contacted me. No, it’s a personal indiscretion.” She paused, gathering her courage. “With a woman.”

“A woman? I see.” A frown passed quickly over his face and disappeared. “But how does that affect your work here, or the campaign?”

Mia pressed her forehead, as if to push away a headache. “She’s blackmailing me, threatening to go to the newspapers. And her revelations could prove an embarrassment to the White House, particularly now.”

“Did you commit a crime?”

“No sir. Nothing like that.”

“Did you do anything violent?”

“Not at all. Quite the opposite.”

“Then the issue is your fear of public opinion?”

“Public opinion that could taint the president, yes sir.”

He leaned back and lit up a cigarette, a trick he always used to give himself a moment to think. He inhaled and blew out smoke.

“The president is more resilient than you might think. We have a number of people of your… uh… disposition on the presidential staff, and it has so far never been an issue. But if she’s threatening to make the information public, we’ll have to separate you from the White House.”

“Exactly, sir. That’s the reason for my resignation.”

“No, no. Nothing as radical as that. We need only relocate you where you will be irrelevant to the campaign. To Moscow, for example.”

She was taken aback. “Moscow? On what pretense? Weren’t we just there two months ago?”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t be a pretense. As you know, inventory is still disappearing mysteriously, and I’m convinced the problem is in the Russian distribution.”

“So, you want to post me to Moscow, alone, to deal again with Mr. Molotov and his complaints?”

“You wouldn’t be alone. Mr. Harriman would meet you and fill you in on the status quo. The State Department will not mind issuing another air ticket, and you already have credentials with the Kremlin and the Ministry of Armaments. You have as much expertise to deal with them as anyone.”

“And you think that’ll work. I mean, to protect the president?”

“I’m certain it will. The heads of the major newspapers aren’t interested in embarrassing Mr. Roosevelt. They’ve downplayed his paralysis for three terms, so if your blackmailing friend shows up in their offices with such accusations, the editors will come to us for confirmation, and we’ll say we have no such person working in the White House.”