Leningrad, May 1, 1943
There had been weeks when she had not fired a shot. She crawled, she compressed, she waited and she watched. This was not one of those weeks.
Off to the south, the ground shook. Her veteran ear and her veteran fingers felt the air rent and the ground rumble. A tank army was slamming into a German panzer division. An artillery division was firing a week’s worth of shells in a morning. The German siege lines were being pressured by a potential relieving force. Already, at least one infantry battalion had been pulled back. Now she was waiting for the lines to thin out, and reserves to make themselves visible.
Seven hundred meters away, a German captain swore. His company needed to expand their position to cover the left flank of the regiment. They were already on the edge of responsibility and had been loosely linked to the next regiment to the north. Now his frontage was being doubled as the bordering regiment was being pulled back into reserve to replace a regiment in reserve that was countering the current Red Army thrust. The division was sending a battle group from their reserves to fill the gap, but he needed to move. He looked at his men and closed his eyes for a moment as he took in the readiness of each of sub-officers. Heinrich and his men could move from reserve to the new positions.
She watched the segment of the trenches and strong points. Here and there elements of helmets came over the dirt lips before re-submerging. A private was not worth a shot, at least not now. In the middle of battle, a machine gunner could be worth her exposure. She waited as her spotter cataloged the moments.
And then there was movement. A helmet popped up at the end of a communication trench. And then another, and another. Almost forty men were soon movement, dashing from cover to cover. The officer in charge was in front and alert. He had to be the target instead of the under-officers. The incompetent, young, and glory seeking officers weren’t her priority targets, they could be far more effective at getting their units killed if they lived. She brought the rifle to readiness and then waited for the wind to steady. Soon he would enter the sight picture, and she had to guess where he would be as he stopped and staggered in an anti-sniper weave. Finally, she was sure, and then her fingers took on a life of their own as the trigger went past the action point and a bullet left the barrel of her rifle.
Tatianna could not look, she did not look. Instead she was crawling to a new position. A few seconds later, a machine gun started to fire. The string of German bullets was tightly clustered and close enough, twenty yards to the right and thirty yards short, to keep her moving. Mortars would soon be seeking her out.
