All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Adeen, shest, vosyem
. Every fiber
of his nervous system leaps awake.
He turns up the volume as far as it will go and presses the headphones against his ears. Again it
comes: 
Ponye-something-feshky, shere-something-doroshoi
. . . Volkheimer is looking at him
through the open back of the truck shell as though he can sense it, as though he is coming awake for
the first time in months, as he did that night out in the snow when Hauptmann fired his pistol, when
they realized Werner’s transceivers worked.
Werner turns the fine-tune dial fractionally, and abruptly the voice booms into his ears, 
Dvee-
nat-set, shayst-nat-set, davt-set-adeen,
nonsense, terrible nonsense, pipelined directly into his
head; it’s like reaching into a sack full of cotton and finding a razor blade inside, everything
constant and undeviating and then that one dangerous thing, so sharp you can hardly feel it open
your skin.
Volkheimer raps his massive fist on the side of the Opel to quiet the Neumanns, and Werner
relays the channel to Bernd on the far transceiver and Bernd finds it and measures the angle and
relays it back and now Werner settles in to do the math. The slide rule, the trigonometry, the map.
The Russian is still talking when Werner pulls his headset down around his neck. “North
northwest.”
“How far?”

---

Only numbers. Pure math.
“One and a half kilometers.”
“Are they broadcasting now?”
Werner closes one cup of the headphones over an ear. He nods. Neumann One starts the Opel
with a roar and Bernd comes crashing back through the flowers carrying the first transceiver and
Werner withdraws the aerial and they grind off the road and directly through the sunflowers,
punching them down as they go. The tallest are nearly as tall as the truck, and their big dry heads
drum the roof of the cab and the sides of the box.
Neumann One watches the odometer and calls out distances. Volkheimer distributes weapons.
Two Karabiner 98Ks. The Walther semiautomatic with the scope. Beside him, Bernd loads
cartridges into the magazine of his Mauser. 
Bong,
go the sunflowers. 
Bong bong bong
. The truck
yaws like a ship at sea as Neumann One coaxes it over ruts.
“Eleven hundred meters,” calls Neumann One, and Neumann Two scrambles onto the hood of
the truck and peers above the field with binoculars. To the south, the flowers give way to a patch
of raveled gherkins. Beyond those, ringed by bare dirt, stands a pretty cottage with a thatched roof
and stucco walls.
“The line of yarrow. End of the field.”
Volkheimer raises his scope. “Any smoke?”
“None.”
“An antenna?”
“Hard to say.”
“Shut off the motor. On foot from here.”
Everything goes quiet.
Volkheimer, Neumann Two, and Bernd carry their weapons into the flowers and are swallowed.
Neumann One stays behind the wheel, Werner in the truck shell. No land mines explode in front of
them. All around the Opel, the flowers creak on their stems and nod their heliotropic faces as if in
some sad accord.
“Fuckers are going to be surprised,” whispers Neumann One. His right thigh jogs up and down
several times a second. Behind him, Werner raises the aerial as high as he dares and clamps on the
headphones and switches on the transceiver. The Russian is reading what sounds like letters of the
alphabet. 
Peh zheh kah cheh yu myakee znak
. Each utterance seems to rise from the aural cotton
for Werner’s ears alone, then melts away. Neumann One’s vibrating leg shakes the truck lightly,
and the sun flares through the remnants of insects smeared across the windows, and a cold wind
sets the whole field rustling.
Won’t there be sentries? Lookouts? Armed partisans sidling up right now behind the truck? The
Russian on the radio is a hornet in each ear,