War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01]

by David Robbins

  He lit the lantern. His head roved from the lovemaking and the vodka. He dug into his pack to tug off a piece of bread and chewed absentmindedly. Where to start? he wondered. Where do I look for a master sniper who’s looking for me?

  He decided to return to sector two, to Mamayev Kurgan, where he and Tania had encountered Thorvald the morning before. Had he known of the Headmaster’s arrival then, he’d have sent Danilov away and, with Tania, taken him on right there.

  With Tania. The thought surprised him a little. Yes. She’s good enough. I’d fight with her at my side now.

  Well, he thought, up and out. Over to the Lazur, get Tania, and we’ll go hunting in her sector first for this SS colonel.

  Viktor burst through the doorway.

  “Vasha! The Germans have attacked the Red October. It’s big! Six, seven divisions!”

  “Shit. Here it comes.” This must be the Germans’ last bid to capture the city. We all knew it would come before the Volga froze. This is it. November eleventh, dawn. And I overslept.

  Zaitsev grabbed his rifle.

  Viktor gathered Zaitsev’s pack and extra ammunition, continuing to jabber. “They’re on a five-kilometer front. Between the Banny Gully and Vokhovstroyevskaya Street.”

  “Who’s defending?”

  “Gorishny’s Ninety-fifth in the factory and the corridor. Lyudnikov and the One thirty-eighth in the shops.”

  Zaitsev tossed the last of the bread to Viktor.

  “They’ll hold. Where—”

  “I’ve already been to the Lazur. I sent every bear and hare I could find over there. We need to hurry. It’s closing up fast.”

  Zaitsev flew out of the bunker behind Viktor, his rifle in his fist. With his free hand, he shouldered the strap of his submachine gun. The heavy PPSh and its round, stubby magazine bounced against his spine while he ran. Viktor jangled under an assortment of grenades, cartridges, knives, field glasses, and guns.

  Sectors two and three, Zaitsev thought. That’s where the attack is. Kulikov is in two, Morozov in three.

  Nikolay Kulikov. He wasn’t at the celebration last night. He and Baugderis probably stayed in their trench overnight to work their tin can lines again at dawn. They’re already in the thick of it. I’ve got to get to them.

  Chuikov pulled me off all assignments to hunt down the sniper from Berlin. But it can’t be helped at the moment. I’ll get back to Thorvald later. He’ll keep.

  Besides, he might even be in sector two, waiting for me.

  The Hare and the Bear ran through trenches and empty alleys to reach the Volga. There, behind the safety of its cliffs along the littered beach, lay the main route from the Lazur to the troops defending the factory district.

  The Nazi general Paulus had made reaching the river a priority, to isolate the Russian positions into small beachheads, especially now during the supply crisis. But running, Zaitsev felt in his shaking bones that this last offensive spasm by the Germans was doomed. He knew Chuikov’s Sixty-second Army was well dug in. To a man, the Ivans were fired up on vodka and stoked to a red glow by the bellows of the commissars’ ceaseless bunker speeches, their foxhole whispers, their iron nudges.

  Nearing the Red October, Zaitsev heard the boom of artillery and tank fire. Viktor slowed. Great puffs of steam heaved from his mouth. His wide shoulders slumped under the weights strapped to him.

  Zaitsev patted Viktor’s shoulder. “Bear, we need to hurry.”

  “Let’s rest a moment,” Viktor huffed. “No sense getting there and being too tired to kill any Germans.” He trotted to a halt on the sand and bent over, hands on knees, breathing like a draft horse just in from the plow.

  Zaitsev felt drops of sweat on his brow under his fur hat. He looked across the green river to the wooded islands two kilometers offshore. Behind those islands are food, ammunition, vodka, medicine, warmer boots, he thought. The Volga, the most beloved river of Russian lore, is even now shifting, deciding whether to help or destroy its countrymen.

  The great ice floes drifted in the river; they bumped and grumbled below the surface. A milky skim of ice had formed in places along the bank, still too thin to walk on. But it was coming, the ice was gathering. How long until it was thick enough to drive a truck over? A month, perhaps? Will we still be here? ,

  “I’ll go ahead, Viktor.” Zaitsev broke into a run up the beach. “Good hunting!” He left Viktor wheezing behind him. The sand hissed under his boots.

  Vasha, the sand whispered, don’t forget the Headmaster.

  The Volga ice giants slid past each other and keened, Vasha, he’s looking for you.

  Once off the beach, moving through the streets, the barren buildings leaned over him to mutter in his ear.

  Vasha, be careful, the city said.

  He stopped in the street and looked around. A hundred Red soldiers ran past. Shouts and rifle reports surrounded him.

  Thorvald, Vasha. Thorvald.

  * * * *

  THE FIGHTING WAS BEHIND HIM NOW. HE DUCKED INTO trenches and crawled through the windows of buildings in his path. His ears were as attuned as his eyes; he was ready to freeze like a chameleon at any motion or sound in the rubble. He advanced undetected, as he knew he could.

  He moved with a strength beyond what was in his arms and legs. It was in his stomach, in his senses. He knew that the war was not looking for him at that moment. It was absorbed elsewhere. He was at his zenith, his most powerful and canny; he was alert to any threat, ready to face danger and portion it out, creeping along the seams of the battle, set on instinct to vanish into the fabric of conflict. Though he’d tried over many a bottle and cigarette, in dozens of trenches under the flickering night-lights of tumbling flares with freshmen and seasoned veterans, he could never find the words to express it: war, when you know it, when you have it inside you, is an animal. You can scare it away, hide from it, even anger it or feed it something other than you. You can’t control it, but you can think like it. This was the skill Zaitsev could not teach to his hares. It lived in him at the visceral level, beneath words and intellect; it had breathed first in the taiga, been awakened in his blood by his grandfather. A soldier either possessed it, as Viktor and Chekov did, or won it, as Tania had done, or didn’t have it at all, no matter how brave or clever. He remembered the dead boy, the young bear Fedya.

  He wondered about the Headmaster. Does he have it? Is his killing skill in his intellect or his gut? Is he a teacher, a soldier, or a hunter?

  What will Thorvald show me? How patient is he? Where is he? Is he waiting for me to move into his crosshairs, or is he still stalking me? Will he try to flush me out, or will he set a trap and let me fall into it?

  Zaitsev gazed at the hulls of the buildings opposite him. He looked to the burned shacks of the factory settlements, north to the remains of the Red October and, deep in the smoking distance, the Barricades. He thought about the city stretching behind him, tracing the arcing bank of the Volga in a crescent of desolation. It was all different now. Before, Stalingrad had been a battlefield, with maps, sectors, front lines, flanks, supply routes, the river—all building blocks defining the city. He’d grown to know it, learning the ruined terrain the best way a man could, by hiding in it. From his first days in the storm groups, the city had moved with a rhythm Zaitsev could feel, like the forest or the Pacific tides in Vladivostok. But now lurking within the shadows and cracks was a wild, unpredictable element: a single man with one mission, to find and kill him, the Hare. An SS colonel, a master sniper, skilled beyond what Zaitsev could guess, armed with his prey’s photograph and sheets of Danilov’s articles describing the sniper tactics Zaitsev had pioneered.

  If Thorvald was the sniper who had shot up the dummy in sector two, then he was uncannily fast and deadly accurate. And, remembering Pyotr’s ragged face, Zaitsev sensed that there was something else about him. Something skewed, perhaps bizarre.

  Zaitsev moved far enough west to see the rail yard bordering the Red October workers’ settlements. He was in the
area of the icehouses, due north of the Lazur. Striakov counterattacked half a kilometer behind him. To his left, the echoes of tanks and boots clacked among the bricks and stark stone facades. The Germans were moving up to answer Striakov.

  The shooting cells he’d shared with Kulikov and Baugderis were nearby. He scanned with his scope—the binoculars were better for the job at hand, but he preferred his finger on the trigger in uncertain situations like this—looking for the five ruined boxcars. They would mark the German trench, Kulikov’s tin-can hunting preserve of the afternoon before.

  He slid forward another twenty meters. The first boxcar became visible at the far end of the yard, atop a rail mound, below a bank of warehouses. He recognized the terrain. There, another fifty meters to his left, would be Kulikov’s trench.

  This last stretch was across an open yard. The ground was covered with debris. Resisting the urge to hurry this final distance, Zaitsev reached into his pack for a muslin sack. He slid his rifle and machine gun into the sack and pulled the drawstring. He moved slowly into the open, flat on his belly. He crept twenty meters in five minutes, stopping every five seconds to blend in with the cluttered earth. He crawled down into a shallow crater. He pulled on his rope and dragged the dirty tan sack just as slowly to him across the open yard. Gathering in the rope, he thought about the attributes of this sort of battlefield, how a man could turn them to his favor. If a man was careful and watchful, he could always find cover. If he knew how and when to move, he might travel at will throughout the city and remain invisible in the tangled shadows and rubble. The Germans surely had not thought of this when they bombed Stalingrad without relent in August and September, that they were simply building rats’ nests, runs, craters, and shadows for the Red soldier.

  After a half hour, he reached the lip of the trench, not knowing what he would find. He pulled his rifle sack to him quickly and put the weapons in his hands.

  He stopped to cast his senses out into the yard and enveloping buildings. He was certain he’d arrived unseen. The German assault had moved behind him; he felt the emptiness of the rail yard. Here, less than a kilometer from the action, the buildings were quiet, spitting out only echoes of the fighting from the northeast Volga cliffs and the bowels of the factory.

  He slipped into the trench, hoping he would not find the two hares. In the quiet of the yard, he admitted to himself he held little hope of finding Kulikov and Baugderis alive. If they’re still in the trench, he thought, they’re dead. Before dawn, this trench was on the very edge of the front line. The German advance would have swept right over them at full, sudden speed before anything could slow it down. They might’ve been able to retreat across the open yard, but only at a dead run, and that would have gotten them cut down by a hundred guns.

  He realized that he’d followed an unspoken command to come to Kulikov and Baugderis. Even if he would only find corpses, he understood consciously now that he could not have left his friends to stiffen and blister under the winter sky. He knew also he could not expect to evacuate the bodies for a proper burial; that must wait until the Germans were run out of Stalingrad. But in order to write to their mothers to tell how their sons had died, he knew he had to come here. It was, in his secret way, what he wanted done for himself should he, too, be trapped and killed.

  Honor for the dead; loyalty from the living. No man can desire these things and justly deserve them if he does not give them. This was fair. This was one of the rules of life and death.

  Zaitsev moved fifty meters through the trench before he saw them. He hurried to the bodies slumped on the trench floor, and his heart began the quick descent into anger.

  The first body was Baugderis. The Georgian lay against the trench wall, his arms spread, with his legs twisted under him. His posture seemed joyful, as if he’d leaped into the air to wave his arms and kick his heels. His face gave the lie to that. The right eye socket was a mass of dull color and flesh. Black blood cloaked his shoulder and right arm, spilled from the cavity Zaitsev knew was in the back of the man’s head.

  On Baugderis’s right, a meter away, was Kulikov. Beside him was his helmet, a bullet hole punched in the side of it. Near his hand lay his artillery periscope.

  Zaitsev stepped over Baugderis’s body to kneel beside Kulikov. Blood had clotted over half of his friend’s face and neck. A dark pool rested in his ear.

  Zaitsev bent close to inspect the gash across the side of Kulikov’s forehead. At the center of the wound, in the heart of the dried blood, a bright red cleft beat like a tiny tongue sticking out, pulling back. A trickle gathered into a drop, then ran a crimson ribbon down the crust. It stopped, but it had run far enough to tell Zaitsev that Kulikov was alive.

  His hands flew to his friend’s neck, his thumbs on his cheeks. He shook them hard. “Nikolay! Open your eyes!”

  Kulikov exhaled and swayed his head. His eyelids fluttered, showing Zaitsev the whites.

  Zaitsev patted Kulikov’s cheek, harder each time until the eyes opened and focused. Zaitsev reached for his pack and canteen. He pulled open the man’s mouth and poured water in. Most of it dribbled down Kulikov’s neck until he began to swallow.

  “Slowly. Slowly, Nikolay. It’s all right.”

  Kulikov pushed away the canteen and coughed. He squinted and groaned. He brought his hand to his head but could not bring himself to touch the wound.

  “Wha . . . what? ...” Kulikov turned toward Baugderis. His eyes took in the pulp of his friend’s face. “Oh. Oh, shit,” he muttered, fear popping in his eyes.

  “You’re all right, Nikolay,” Zaitsev said reassuringly. “You’ve just got a flesh wound on your head. You’re not going to die. I’ll get you back.”

  Kulikov closed his lids. He drew a deep breath. “The attack. Where? . . .” he said in a voice searching for strength.

  Zaitsev interrupted. “It’s all right. They’re behind us now. It moved past you.”

  Kulikov leaned his head back to look into the morning sky.

  A grimace creased his lips. “I don’t remember. More water.”

  Zaitsev handed him the canteen. What does he mean, he doesn’t remember the attack? Yes, he’s been unconscious for over two hours. But isn’t that how Baugderis got killed, how Kulikov took his wound? The German attack ran over them, their retreat was cut off; they put up resistance and drew fire.

  “Nikolay,” he asked, “how did you get hit?”

  Kulikov looked again at Baugderis. “Sniper.”

  Zaitsev’s jaw tightened.

  Kulikov struggled to sit up. “The attack came just after dawn. No way we could stay here. But ...” He snorted, almost in a somber laugh. “I guess we did anyway.”

  Zaitsev waited for Kulikov to gather himself.

  “We figured we’d head out from this end of the trench. Maybe we could make it to the icehouses if we ran. We moved this way, tugging on the strings one last time. We didn’t wait long, just enough to see what we could flush out. We got one more.”

  Nikolay touched his cheek. His fingers trembled over the lumps of blood built up like gathered wax. He brushed his hair at the temple and found it packed hard.

  He grunted when his fingertips neared the wound.

  “Leave it,” Zaitsev told him. “We’ll get it fixed soon.”

  Kulikov dropped his hand and chuckled painfully, nervously, at his good luck.

  He continued. “Once we got here, I pulled the string and spotted. We were in a hurry at this point. Nothing happened, and we were about to move to the last position. Then, and I can’t tell you why, I saw a German poke his head up. I called Zviad into the shot. He fired, and just like that he got hit.”

  On the top of the trench, lying in the dirt where it had been when the bullet struck, was Baugderis’s Moisin-Nagant. Zaitsev pulled the rifle down and gasped.

  The telescopic sight was shattered. A bullet had gone into it, smashing through the tube into Baugderis’s right eye.

  Baugderis had not had even the two seconds it took t
o fire and look away from the scope before the German killed him.

  Zaitsev pulled back the rifle’s bolt to pop out the spent casing. He hadn’t had a chance to move a muscle, he thought. Baugderis fired, watched his bullet hit, and died on his feet.

  “I didn’t see where it came from,” Kulikov said, shaking his head. “I ... I was so . . . when he got hit, it came out of nowhere. It scared the shit out of me, Vasha. I guess I must have stood up.”

  Zaitsev nodded. “Just for a second,” he mumbled, more to himself than to Kulikov.

  Thorvald. He was here. And the bastard wants me to know it.

  “Just for a second,” Kulikov echoed. “There must have been two or three of them. We . . . we stayed too long.”