ОНА СПАСЛА ДЕСЯТКИ БОЙЦОВ НО СТАРЫЙ ХИРУРГ ЗАМЕТИЛ КАК ОНА ЗАВЯЗЫВАЕТ БИНТ И ТИХО ВЫЗВАЛ СМЕРШ

In the winter of 1943, an old surgeon accomplished what seven counterintelligence agents had failed to do. He didn't know Abwehr regulations, didn't read intercepted messages, and couldn't decipher the radio operators' handwriting. He watched a young nurse tie a bandage. The same knot, the same motor skills—he'd seen it once in a Kiev hospital in 1918, with a captured doctor from Munich. The prisoner was dying of gas gangrene and, until his last minute, taught him how to tie a blood vessel so it wouldn't leak. Twenty-five years ago. The old man remembered. And when, in January of 1943, strange fingers tied that very knot in his dressing room, he realized: this wasn't who she claimed to be. And now, in order. The snowstorm had been lashing from the northwest, steadily, without pause, for three days. The one-and-a-half-ton truck stalled two miles from Podbuzhye—the driver's front axle had sunk into a snowdrift, cursing wearily and heartlessly. Captain Kirsan Drozd climbed out of the cab, adjusted his belt and holster, and pulled up his sheepskin coat. He'd walked to the village. The road was snow-covered. The snow was knee-deep, waist-deep in places. Kirsan made his way along the shoulder, where telegraph poles jutted out—the only landmark. A mile later, a convoy emerged from the whiteout—three carts covered with tarpaulins. The horses stood with their heads down, steam billowing from their nostrils. The driver of the first cart dozed on the box, his collar up, his hat over his eyes. In the second cart, under the tarpaulin, someone groaned—muffled, steady, like a metronome. Wounded. They were being taken somewhere to the rear, to the station. Kirsan passed by without stopping. The driver hadn't woken up. Behind the wagon train, about three hundred meters away, craters darkened the snow—fresh, uncovered. Mortar shells. Kirsan stopped and looked closer. Three craters, a row, spread about fifteen meters. Eighty-one-millimeter shells. They'd been fired recently—maybe two times a day. Shrapnel and earth were scattered across the snow, not yet buried. So the front line was close. Closer than his orders stated. The school stood on the edge. A one-story brick building, with a caved-in roof over the teachers' quarters. The Germans had shelled it in the fall, then ours, then the Germans again. Now it was a hospital. Above the porch was a red cross on a white cloth, the cloth fluttering in the wind, the edge frozen. A nurse, about fifty years old, wearing a greatcoat without shoulder straps, was smoking by the door. "To the head doctor," Kirsan said. The orderly looked him over, nodded, and pointed his thumb inside. Not a word. The room smelled of carbolic acid, baked bread, and gunpowder. The gunpowder smoke had ingrained the walls since the autumn battles; nothing could dislodge it. Kirsan walked down the corridor. The classroom doors had been torn off, replaced by tarpaulin tents hung on nails. Beyond the tents were two-tiered bunks, groans, rustling sounds, and someone's rhythmic coughing. The wind blew through the broken windows; the windows were covered with burlap, the burlap flapping. He found the head doctor in ward four. He stood over the wounded man, leaning over, listening to his stomach through a towel. He was tall and thin, with a pointed beard, gray and neatly trimmed. His fingers were long, yellowed from tobacco. "Matvey Osipovich Koval?" Kirsan asked. "I'm right here, my dear fellow." The voice was slow, with a professorial intonation, as if the man were giving a lecture rather than listening to the wounded man. "Captain Drozd. A sanitary inspection from the Army Special Department." Koval looked up at him. Gray, attentive. He lingered a second longer than expected. "Check it out, my dear fellow. Just don't disturb me. I have a laparotomy in forty minutes."