Free Moskva by Jack Grimwood

to know that.
    When he was finished, Tom scrubbed the board and hung it back on the wall, washed the knife and the scissors, rinsed out the sink, put away his olive oil and salt and pepper, and poured himself another whiskey, taking it through to the darkness of his sitting room.
    The alcohol would help, but it wasn’t enough to dull the rage at what some bastard had done to the poor bloody cat, and he knew he’d still be seeing its carcass hung above his sink as he tried to sleep.

 

11
     
Cross Hairs
     
    He’d looked lonely in the cross hairs. So lonely that Wax Angel wondered if he’d welcome a bullet. When it came to it, people often did.
    ‘You …’
    ‘Me what?’
    The
militsiya
man had looked sharply at her dishevelled state. So she’d glanced sharply back and made a point of buttoning the front of her dress. Only when he’d turned away did she return to the ancient Zeiss F-4 sniper’s sight she kept hidden in her clothing. It had been black once but in the last ten years its paint had begun to peel away in scabs. She still had the leather caps that fitted on either end though.
    She’d watched the foreigner and his friend move through falling snow, his head down and his shoulders hunched, his thoughts a black cloud above him.
    One hundred paces.
    Two hundred paces.
    If the snow had been heavy, she’d have lost him by now.
    If the snow had really been falling, she’d have lost him before he travelled the distance of his own arm. At four hundred paces he’d begun to blur, vanishing at five. And Wax Angel realized the snow settling on her was camouflage. No need now for the white uniforms they’d worn and the sniper rifles wrapped in rags they’d carried through the smoking ruins of Stalingrad.
    After the Englishman and his friend had gone, the coroner’s wagon had arrived. The woman driving had glanced over, made to turn away and then headed in Wax Angel’s direction. ‘Are you all right?’ she’d asked.
    ‘Yes, thank you,’ Wax Angel had said. ‘Are you?’
    ‘You must be freezing.’
    ‘This is nothing,’ Wax Angel said. ‘This is practically summer.’
    ‘Here.’ Digging into her jeans pocket, the woman had found a rouble. ‘Buy yourself something hot. You’ll buy food, right?’
    She meant food rather than vodka.
    Wax Angel was impressed that she left that part unsaid.
    After the coroner’s office took the body, the
militsiya
man abandoned his post without sealing the ruin, or even putting tape across its door. How could Wax Angel not go to investigate? She found the burned-out building to her liking. There was something familiar, almost comfortable about its ruin.
    Even better was a smouldering pile in one corner, with enough embers at the bottom to restart the fire once the rubble smothering it was dragged away.
    Wax Angel spent a happy hour feeding the growing flames with every unburned scrap of wood she could find and then settled back to enjoy the warmth while snowflakes fluttered down in the sections of the warehouse where the roof had fallen away.
    She could remember real blizzards, God wiping the face of the earth until everything was white.
    She’d been younger then, of course. Much younger than the girl who’d given her money … And it was a long, long way from here. She’d been a campaign wife, but with a difference. Other ‘campaign wives’ were clerks or signallers. She was asniper in her own right, dozens of kills to her record, her photograph in the army newspaper.
    He was different too.
    A political officer with actual battle experience.
    He wasn’t one of those red-badged fools who screamed through a megaphone from the rear that everyone had to advance, that the Motherland was counting on them. He expected everyone to advance, right enough; he expected them to die. He just found that the walking dead fought better if talked to properly.
    Not softly but firmly.
    He’d been matter-of-fact about shooting anyone who tried to retreat.
    It was the woman by the