And then there was silence. Cold silence.
Men and vehicles stopped. As they had done in the past under a variety of circumstances, the shell-shocked and the inexperienced looked toward their officers and to the older soldiers for an explanation. Fresh conscripts turned expectantly toward men who had lived through the Blitzkrieg and the Siege of Leningrad, where starvation, cold, and round-the-clock bombings killed a million of their countrymen. Surely these battle-hardened survivors, the frontoviki, could tell them what had just happened.
But even they had never heard a sound like this before. No one had.
It was the boom of a supersonic object decelerating.
A palpable sense of confusion, mingled ever so slightly with fear, moved through the Soviet ranks. Hundreds of soldiers stopped whatever they were doing to search the sky, shielding their eyes against the sun’s glare. Those with the best eyes, or who happened to be looking in the right direction, perceived a faint metallic glint, moving with unnatural speed against the heavens. Some of the men instinctively raised their weapons but by then the plane—or whatever it was—had already disappeared from view.
Aleksey Karasev was a master sergeant in the Red Army but with three gold war stripes he commanded as much respect among the soldiers as any general. Karasev blew a cloud of smoke from a cigar that resembled a mummified finger. Can’t be artillery, he thought. At last report, German tank divisions were more than seventy miles away. It hadn’t sounded like artillery either.
“?б твою мать!” the sergeant cursed, “Keep moving!” But there was already a commotion up ahead. What now, he thought, striding toward the source of the problem—a cargo truck that had stopped in the road. Karasev knew that his weary men would use any excuse to catch a few moments of rest—and if left to their own devices some of them would settle in, like homesteaders, right there in the mud.
The truck was one of the newly arrived American models. A Dodge, they called it. The driver of the canvas-sided vehicle, a young Russian woman, hung out the open door, pointing excitedly at the sky. The grizzled sergeant never noticed that she was extremely attractive, with long black hair that hung down the thickly padded polushubki she wore. Now, though, she let her truck’s engine stall. A little knot of soldiers, clustered near the truck, was tracking a path from her index finger into the sky.
“There! There!” she shouted.
Several of the men stood by mutely, while others, having caught a glimpse of the truck driver, puffed themselves up to full height.
One of the girl’s new guardians fired a single round into the air. It was immediately followed by several more from the man’s companions.
Sergeant Karasev could see that they were taking aim at two parachutes that had appeared above them—white circles with a red marking of some kind—incongruous against the blue sky.
There was another shot, this one from farther up the convoy. Karasev squinted into the unnaturally bright sky. There were more parachutes—perhaps half a dozen that he could see—and more rifle fire.
Returning his attention to the closest chutes overhead, Karasev saw that there were no men hanging below them. Instead, there were black canisters.
Supply drop? Karasev wondered. Another botched attempt by the Luftwaffe? But another thought intruded, bothering him remotely: The canisters seemed too small to be carrying very much in the way of fuel or supplies.
One more shot cracked the morning air and Karasev’s thoughts refocused. Not only were these idiots wasting ammo, they were probably alerting the enemy.
“Who gave the order to fire?” he barked, but something kept his eyes focused skyward, even though his neck was beginning to ache badly. “Damn you! Cease—”
The containers suspended below the two nearest parachutes exploded, simultaneously.
A cheer went up and a few of the shooters turned back toward the girl seeking approval or perhaps just a smile. Instead the gunfire, the bursting canisters, or both had startled the partisan, and she retreated into the cab of the truck and rolled up the window.
Karasev was not thinking about the woman. He was thinking about the accuracy and range of the Mosin-Nagant rifles his men were carrying: the supply-drop containers were too high off the ground when they exploded. Far too high.
His men seemed to realize this as well, and Karasev saw that his was not the only face now creased with concern. He looked skyward again but there was nothing left to see except the wounded parachutes, one of which fell near the convoy. Before he could stop them, two of the shooters were tramping their way through thick, wet snow.
The men were out of breath by the time they reached the chute, though it had landed fewer than a hundred steps ahead—strangely beautiful, in its own way: stark white and crimson against the mud.
“Draja, this silk is priceless.”