КАК ДЕД-ПОМОР ПЕРЕХИТРИЛ ФИНСКИХ ДИВЕРСАНТОВ ОДНОЙ ЛЕСНОЙ ПРИМЕТОЙ

Headquarters called out the call sign "Marten" over and over again, and heard only crackling sounds. The radio, for which they were risking their lives, went silent in the middle of the Karelian swamp. The bearings didn't match. The radio operators in their headphones twisted the verniers until their fingers ached—nothing. Only the rustle of the airwaves and the damp squeak of fog in the wires. And twenty paces from the stone manhole, an old man in a cloth coat was burning rotten aspen. He didn't look at the smoke. He felt the wet moss with his fingers, wringing it out like women wringing out laundry, and listened. Not the radio—he had no need for that. He listened to the forest. The titmouse over the swamp. The nutcracker beyond the ridge. And that spot on the slope where not a single bird sang. He didn't look for tracks. The Finns walked over stone, over bare rock, where boots leave nothing. There had been no trace for three days. Grandpa hadn't even thought to look for them. He listened to the birds. And the birds had already told him everything. My name is Artyom Groza, Senior Lieutenant, a counterintelligence officer. I was assigned to a reconnaissance group with one mission: to capture alive an enemy spotter who was holed up right next to the Kirov Road, in our immediate rear, and obtain his code. And then, at the end of three days, I still didn't believe the old man—although I should have believed him long ago. Because for those three days we'd been wandering around the cliff like blind kittens, while the enemy attacked along the Kirov Road and retreated into the rock. I'll tell you from the very beginning. From how, for three days, we couldn't figure out where the Finn had disappeared to. The cliff stretched in ridges, gray, wet, covered in lichen. Between the ridges lay mossy windows of the swamp—stick your foot in, and you'd sink knee-deep into the freezing ooze. Wet wild rosemary lay beneath your boots. A drizzle crept down your collar, not rain, but a mist that never dries your greatcoat. We walked in a line, separated by five paces. Eight soldiers, me, and my grandfather. Three days in a row. "Comrade Senior Lieutenant," Sergeant Koltsov hissed nearby, "there's no one here. Bare rock." Bare rock, indeed it was. A Finnish spotter had been directing artillery at trains for three weeks. An ammunition train was burning near Maselgskaya. Then a fuel tanker collapsed. Then an ambulance was engulfed. Someone was sitting here, in these swamps, with a radio, seeing the road and talking into the air. But we couldn't find him. They assigned me a guide. I asked for a competent local tracker, a hunter, a scout. They sent me a Pomor. Pavel Mezentsev. Sixty-three years old. A trapper from the White Sea, where there had never been a front or Finns. A woolen coat, a knapsack over his shoulder, a graying beard. He was silent so profoundly, as if words were worth money and he was saving them. "Grandpa," I said to him on the first morning, "do you know the azimuth?" "I don't know," he replied. "Do you read the map?" "I don't." That was the end of the conversation. I cursed silently through my teeth. They gave me an old man who didn't know the azimuth to help me on a remote cliff. He didn't follow the compass. He stopped, raised his beard to the sky, and sniffed the wind. He looked at the treetops. He touched the bark. Once I crouched over a puddle, looked at it for a minute, and then went in the other direction—not in the direction my azimuth was pointing. "Where are you going, old man?" I barked. "We're heading north." "There's a swamp to the north," he said without turning around. "Chest-deep. Go ahead." We followed him. We circled the swamp. He was right, but that only angered me more. Regulations are regulations. I have orders, a grid of coordinates, a combing area. And he sniffs the air like a dog. On the second day, Koltsov was the first to reach the find. Behind a ridge, in a quiet spot under an overhanging rock, an old fire pit loomed black. Nearby lay a tin can, pressed into the moss, and a scrap of newspaper. The sergeant crouched down and poked a finger into the embers. "Got it!" he hissed. "We were sitting here, Comrade Senior Lieutenant. Fresh off the fire." The blood rushed to my temples. I dropped to a knee next to them, surveyed the square, and motioned for the soldiers to take the ridge on the flanks. Pakhomov snatched up the radio and lay down. We surrounded the empty clearing, as if someone was there. Grandfather approached slowly. He crouched down, stirred the coals with his finger, and sniffed. He picked up the can and twirled it. "Pah," he said. "Yours were sitting here. About three weeks ago." "What made you think that?" I snapped.