“Do you think they’ve retreated?” Alexia asked.

“I’m sure they haven’t. This is just what Major Pavlichenko warned us about. Let me take a look.” Laying her rifle aside, she extended her small periscope and surveyed the field. “So many places he could be,” she muttered. She passed the periscope to Alexia, who saw the same half dozen rocks, broken walls, wrecked vehicles, the blasted remains of a tree trunk. Behind the tree stump something sparkled. A reflection on metal, perhaps?

“I think he’s behind the stump,” Alexia whispered. “How can we force him to shoot first so we can see his muzzle flash?”

“Well, you can try that old trick of raising your cap, while I watch through the periscope,” Sasha said. “Just be sure to keep your head out of it.”

With a grunt, Alexia belly-crawled farther along the gully. Splinters of wood lay about from a blasted fence, and she propped one up with her woolen pilotka at its top, rising only a centimeter above the rim of the depression. No sooner had she crawled out of the way than a shot rang out and the cap flew off the wood.

“He’s there, all right,” Sasha announced. “He thinks he’s got you. Now let me raise mine, and when he moves out to shoot, you get him.”

Alexia was already in place, her eye glued to her scope as Sasha lifted her cap on the post in the same way. The sniper fell for it again. Alexia could see him clearly as he raised himself just high enough to take aim.

Two shots sounded simultaneously, his shot and hers. His hit the mark harmlessly, knocking away Sasha’s pilotka. Alexia’s shot was fatal.

* * *

In the next ten days the division pounded its way southwest through a string of burnt-out villages, until finally it took Menyusha. A third of the sniper unit was lost during the battles, but the surviving women gained the privilege of sleeping in a barn along with the wounded. The medics hung a lantern overhead from one of the beams so they wouldn’t be in total darkness.

While the medics, also mostly women, saw to the needs of the wounded, the sixteen remaining snipers scattered through the barn collecting straw to sleep on.

Alexia leaned against a stall wall across from Sasha, Kalya, and Fatima, and drew off her boots. “Oof. That feels good,” she said, rubbing her toes. “Be nice to have some water to wash off the grit.”

Sasha yanked her boots off as well. “Why stop there? How about wishing for a hot bath and a hair wash?”

Kalya stretched out on the dry straw. “You’re still going on about that shampoo. Well, I’m just glad to be able to get a night’s sleep without worrying about attack or groping hands.”

“What hands have been groping you?” Alexia asked. “It can’t be the men in our division. They’re like our brothers.”

“Not all of them. Some of them can’t seem to keep their hands off these.” Kalya cupped one of her own ample breasts.

Sasha untied her foot cloths and shook them out. “Kalya’s right. On the battlefield, they’re good comrades, but afterward, after a little vodka, they sometimes forget to be ‘brothers.’ The other day, one of them, a lieutenant, believe it or not, tried to kiss me. Said he’d been away from his wife for over a year and had forgotten what a woman’s lips were like. I told him to try a sheep.”

Another woman spoke up. “I’ve never been kissed at all. If the man’s young, and not too dirty, I wouldn’t mind a kiss. We could be dead tomorrow. Who wants to die without ever being kissed?”

Kalya folded her arm back behind her neck as a pillow. “Well, there are kisses and kisses. I got nice kisses from my babushka, and once from a pretty boy in school. Nothing to be excited about. But the serious ones, I think you get only a few of them in life.”

“My sister said a good kiss starts on your lips and then goes all the way down to your groin.” Sasha stretched out and rested on one elbow. “What about you, Alexia? Have you ever had a kiss like that?”

Alexia stared into the distance at the lantern, remembering the kiss that had shaken her. “No. Nothing like that.”

“Well, I’ve kissed a few Germans,” Fatima said, chuckling. “Not on the lips, though. More like between the eyes.” She snorted and rolled over, pulling her field blanket up over her shoulder.

Kalya chuckled. “Yeah. A kiss from Stalin.” Then she also turned away and curled up for the night.

Alexia stared into the darkness for a few moments before dropping off. She dreamt of the icon on her grandmother’s wall, of the long-haired angel, swathed in silk, kissing the Virgin’s mouth.

* * *

After two weeks of nearly constant fighting, they reached Medved, and the spring rains finally arrived in full force. The troops were drenched all the time, and advancement along the roads of deep mud was excruciating.

When the storm tapered off to mere rainfall, Major Bershansky called in two of his favorite snipers.

“Mazarova, Petrova, our scouts spotted some German brass over that hill. Go take a look and see if you can knock off someone of value.”

“Understood, Comrade Major,” Alexia and Kalya said almost in unison.

They crept to where the officers had been spotted and crouched behind some cover, both in capes of tattered rags painted the color of dead leaves. They waited for hours but could see no sign of life. Meanwhile the gray sky darkened even more. Then thunder cracked and a wall of rain fell, and they soon lay shivering in a pool of mud. This was surely a waste of time.

Overhead Alexia heard what sounded like a Tupolev transport. What was it doing here? Supplies usually arrived in Novgorod and were trucked to the lines. Maybe the storm had blown it off course.

She let her mind wander on what it could be carrying. Ammunition almost certainly, but also warm clothing and new boots? Spam maybe?

Another sound filled her with dread. The rat-a-tat of a fighter plane attacking.

She rolled onto her back and looked up, though by now the battle was nearly over. The fighter had shot off half of one of the Tupolev wings and now circled around it, trying for a second shot.

Mortally wounded, the Tupolev managed a wide, curved descent and disappeared behind a distant farmhouse. The absence of explosion told her it had managed a crash landing, and that meant wounded men. Someone had to get to them.

But the moment she stood up, she’d be shot, and so she waited, and waited, watching through her periscope for the slightest movement.

Was it her imagination? No. Something did move at the top of the wall, just a spot, but it wasn’t enough to shoot. If she could just get him to raise his head to aim. For that, she needed to give him a reason to shoot.

She focused on the tiny spot and held it in her sight with a steady hand, compensating for the force of the wind. “Kalya,” she hissed to the other mound under the rag cape a few meters away. “Keep your head down but fire into the air. Let him see your flash.”

Kalya lay flat and out of range but raised the tip of her rifle over her head and fired blindly toward the wall.

As she’d hoped, the dark spot rose to take aim, revealing a paleness beneath it. Alexia fired, and it dropped backward. “Got ’im.”

From her position, facedown in her trench, Kalya chuckled. “Number nineteen. I’ll vouch for you.”

“Good,” Alexia said, collecting the shell from the deadly bullet and dropping it into her pocket. It would rest in her pack alongside the previous eighteen.

* * *

With the enemy sniper eliminated, Alexia and Kalya crept slowly forward until they came within sight of an enemy jeep partially obscured by bushes. A driver sat at the wheel while an officer radioed from the rear.

“This one’s mine,” Kalya murmured as they slid ever closer. Still some five hundred meters away, they stopped.

“Can you do it from here?” Alexia whispered.

“Like giving you a drink,” Kalya said.

Alexia smiled to herself. Da voobsche kak pit’ dat’! She hadn’t heard that expression since childhood. “All right, Miss Show-off. You do him and I’ll get the driver.”

Kalya squirmed into a good firing position, and a short distance away, Alexia did the same. Kalya’s shot had priority, so she did the count. “One… two… three.”

A fraction of a second after Kalya’s gun detonated, Alexia shot.

The two men slumped over in their jeep.

Wasting no time, they sloshed through mud and water back to the 109th Rifle Division headquarters in the largest of the remaining farmhouses. They stood dripping in the doorway and saluted. “Reporting mission successful, Comrade Major,” Kalya said.

“Well done, soldiers. What did you get?”

“Alexia had two clean shots, a driver and a Kraut sniper. Me? I got the officer on his radio. I believe his last radio report was ‘Oh, Scheisse.’”

The major snickered slightly at the German profanity that every man in the Red Army knew.

“Request permission to investigate the plane crash just north of here,” Alexia said more seriously. “It looked like one of our transports.”

“Don’t worry about that, Senior Corporal. I’ve already sent out a squad and a couple of snipers to check on it. In the meantime, reconnaissance has just informed me of a machine-gun nest south of here, near the river. We’ll need to take it out before we can cross. Dry out for a few minutes and get some tea from the field kitchen. We’ll send you both out with Sergeant Sumarov, who spotted them.”

“Yes, Comrade Major,” Kalya replied for both of them. “Will that be all, Comrade Major?”

“Yes. Dismissed.”