27. The More Lethal She Demonstrated Herself to be, the More Dangerous Assignments Pavlichenko Was Given
As the number of her confirmed kills rose, and her lethal cred was further cemented, the military leaned more and more on Lyudmila Pavlichenko, and gave her more and more dangerous assignments. Of those, the hairiest were counter-sniping missions: de facto duels to take out the other side’s snipers. She excelled in those engagements, in which snipers patiently and quietly stalked each other across the lines, with death the common penalty for the first one to make a mistake, and survival the winner’s chief reward.
Pavlichenko fought dozens of sniper duels, and won each and every one of them. The most memorable one that stuck in her mind was against a particularly skilled German sniper she was assigned to take down during the Siege of Sevastopol. She carefully stalked him, even as he stalked her, for three days amidst the debris and wreckage of the city’s ruins. In the end, as she recounted, her adversary made “one move too many“, and ended up as one of 36 enemy snipers whom she took down.