Shaikin backed into the room. Tania pulled the pin on her grenade and brought her arm back to let it fly. From the hall, she heard a whisper.
“Tania? Tania, are you in here?”
Fedya walked into the room, his hands still up, palms facing outward where he’d flung them when surprised by Shaikin’s pistol. Behind him was the giant Griasev.
Shaikin smiled at Tania and Slepkinian.
“We should have known by the noise they were making,” he said quietly. “Bears.”
Tania slipped the pin back into the grenade. “What are you doing here?” she whispered to Fedya. She slid on her stomach back to the window.
“Medvedev sent us. He came up to the floor below you this morning and saw how good your vantage point was. We were in a building three blocks down where nothing was going on.”
Griasev wagged his head. “Not a damn thing.”
“So have you got plenty of Germans for us?” Fedya grinned.
“Take those windows there,” Tania answered, pointing.
“And be quiet,” added Slepkinian.
Tania was impressed with the Cow. She’d looked ready to fight it out, ready to die moments before.
Fedya and Griasev crawled to their places. Fedya set himself into shooting position, knees up. He wrapped the rifle strap around his wrist and elbow. He set a bundled pair of gloves on the sill and laid his barrel on them, careful to keep the muzzle back out of sight from below. He gazed through his scope to take in the German activity across the street. Tania watched him adjust his scope for distance. One-eighth, she thought, certain that he knew.
“What do you think, Tania?” Fedya asked. “Three twenty-five?”
The giant Griasev answered for her. “Three fifty.”
“Three twenty-five,” said Tania.
Fedya looked away from his sight for a moment. He caught Tania looking.
“Yes,” he whispered, “lots of Germans.”
Tania frowned. Fedya shrugged and tilted his head to look innocent, blameless for his sudden appearance here. He returned his attention to the Nazis.
Another hour passed in nippy stillness among the five snipers. Tania continued to curse Zaitsev under her breath for holding up the order to shoot. She followed the two dozen Nazis through her scope, noting how they grew more careless as their movements increased. They were digging new trenches, adding height to old ones and filling sandbags. Some even walked in the open, lugging ammunition boxes four hundred meters away.
They think they’re unseen and clever, Tania thought. They think they’re the ones with a surprise for us. But from this height, the five of us could easily wipe those sticks out. With a signal; that’s all it would take. Where is it?
At that moment, a column of German infantry burst from an alley into the street, only two hundred meters away. Tania raised her head from her scope. There looked to be about twenty in the line jogging in formation directly below.
Tania’s ears were clawed by the pounding of the Nazis’ boots on the pavement. Her hands tightened on the rifle. The bitter taste of bile rose in her throat. She recalled the sight of her grandparents’ bodies in the city square. The leaning shadow of Lenin. The footfalls of Nazis stepping in unison on the bricks. Arms restraining her, shrieks, her own voice and blood. But right now she was the one with a rifle in her hands, she was the one with them in her sights. She clenched her jaw, fleering back her lips, baring her teeth. The moments ticked; Tania felt as if she were swelling to a point where she could not contain herself and would burst.
She brought her eye down to the scope and took aim at the soldier running at the head of the squad. The black crosshairs bobbed from her pounding pulse, but the Nazis were so close below that it made little difference. She followed the one soldier running past in the street below, now less than one hundred meters away.
“Fire!” she screamed, surprised at the abruptness of her voice. Past thinking, as if she had kicked open a gate and now must go through it, she squeezed her trigger. She held tight through the jolt of the shot. The gray-green uniform jogging at the front of the line of soldiers crumpled in her scope.
The Nazis froze. Their heads jerked up at the report roaring above them.
Tania flung back the bolt. The Cow fired. A soldier in the rear of the line clutched his chest and fell.
In an instant, the room was engulfed in the sound of all five sniper rifles opening up. Those soldiers in the front and back of the line were dropped first, then the ones in the middle. The dark bodies piled up beneath the hail of bullets. Tania concentrated on the front of the line, knocking down men stumbling over corpses.
In less than fifteen seconds, it ended. Blue rifle smoke clouded the ceiling and slipped out the windows into the shattered morning. Shell casings littered the floor. Tania and her team sat hunched over their rifles. She surveyed the street through her scope, her heart pounding in her ears. She counted the victims in carnage below, stabbing each magnified body with her reticle. Most of the dead lay in a line, killed where they’d stood in the first few moments. Behind some of the bodies, smears of blood stained the street, marking the short trail of their last effort in life, crawling toward cover.
Tania’s abdomen jittered. The scope danced in her hands. She called out, “Seventeen?”
Shaikin answered, breathless. “Seventeen.”
Tania looked behind the buildings to the Nazi trenches they’d watched since dawn. These Germans had stopped their work to burrow behind their revetments and spin their machine guns back and forth to find the source of the gunfire. We’re too far away, thought Tania, pulling back from the window. They didn’t see us. Good. We’ll attend to them later, and with a bonus of seventeen broken sticks. We got them all.
Tania turned. The other snipers had lowered their rifles. Shaikin and Griasev shook hands. Slepkinian looked left and right, beaming. Only Fedya seemed displeased. He slid bullets into his magazine and shook his head.
Griasev jiggled a meaty, happy fist at Tania.
“That was some ambush,” he said, and exhaled. He clapped his great hands, rubbing them together as if eager to begin a meal.
Tania laid down her rifle and crawled from the window. Shaikin did the same. Slepkinian, Griasev, and Fedya continued to watch the German positions. The Armenian girl whistled at the mounds of dead in the street.
Well away from the windows, Shaikin walked up to Tania. “What do you think?” he asked.
“I think we put them in our books. Three each. And give the extra two to Fedya and the Cow.”
“Then we wait for orders, I guess.”
Tania walked to the doorway to sit on the stairs and collect the thoughts ricocheting in her head. She needed to grab them and cool the frenzy inside her. We’ve been taught to act with initiative, she told herself. To seize opportunities for targets, to make things happen. To wait, wait as long as we have to, then act. That’s what we did here. We waited long enough. All morning. The sticks are the enemy. That’s seventeen of them dead. That’s revenge. What more can Zaitsev want?
Tania looked at her three comrades scanning through their scopes. The light was high in the northeast now, casting shadows behind them on the filthy floor.
Shadows. The light was in their faces.
Tania’s ears pricked up. She heard a low hiss slither in through the windows. With her legs locked, her mind racing, the sound swelled into a whooshing whistle.
No, she thought. No!
The wall in front of her blew apart. Before her senses could leap, a ball of flame and a powerful black gust smashed her backwards. Bricks spewed on all sides, riding the shock wave of the explosion. Tania was hurled against the wall and collapsed to the floor. A sickening nausea spun inside her. She was deafened, numbed by the blow.
When she opened her eyes, the room was shrouded in thick whorls of smoke. Through the heart of the haze Tania saw the huge hole in the wall. The light streaming in gave the room a swirling glow.
Beside her lay Shaikin, his chin
badly gashed and bleeding. He staggered to his feet and braced his hands against the wall as if climbing it. Blood was quickly covering the front of his coat.
“Up!” he screamed at Tania. “Up! Get out!”
Shaikin pulled her to her feet with a grunt. She stood and her knees buckled. Shaikin pushed her against the wall and held her there for a moment until her legs stiffened enough to support her.
Shaikin, his front stained in a crimson bib, gripped Tania’s shoulders to push her to the doorway.
“No,” she murmured, turning back to the room. “Wait.”
Shaikin yelled in her ear, “They’re dead! Dead, Tania! Go!”
He spun her around by the sleeves. She heard his shouts through the havoc. She saw the doorway and lurched toward it, dragging her feet through the rubble.
* * * *
ZAITSEV PUSHED BACK THE BLANKET AND STEPPED gently into the hares’ quarters.
She sat in a corner, where she had been alone for three hours. Shaikin, stumbling from blood loss, had been left with a nurse who’d spotted them retreating along the Volga.
Zaitsev crouched beside her. He leaned onto the toes of his boots, pulling his heels off the floor.
“What happened?” His voice was kinder than his face.
Tania fought back tears. She had not yet cried and did not want to do so in front of Zaitsev.
In an even voice, looking at his boots, she told him of the morning. She described the activity in the trenches behind the buildings, how easy the Germans would have been to pick off, how she and the others had watched patiently for hours. Then the patrol had surprised them, running in from nowhere. She’d reacted quickly, perhaps too quickly.
Zaitsev raised his head at this. Tania looked into his flat face. His eyes throbbed.
“What do you mean, you reacted too quickly?”
Tania felt a twinge of alarm flash across her shoulders.
“I—” She stopped.
Zaitsev’s gaze narrowed. His jaw worked behind drawn lips.
“I fired first. I gave the order,” she admitted.
Zaitsev’s hand lashed across Tania’s face, knocking her onto her side.
He stood from his crouch. “Get up!”
Tania rose. Her face stung, but she did not rub it. She backed against the wall and hung her arms at her sides.
“Comrade,” she began.
“Be quiet.”
Zaitsev stepped closer, his face only a few centimeters away. She felt heat move into the cheek he’d struck.
He shouted in her face. “What are you going to say to me, partisan? Tell me! Tell me you’re sorry you disobeyed a direct order. All right, Comrade Chernova. You’re forgiven. Tell me you’re sorry you jeopardized a vital mission. Again, Comrade Chernova, you’re forgiven. The mission continued anyway.”
He caged his voice behind clenched teeth.
“Now tell me how sorry you are that your actions killed Slepkinian, Griasev, and Michailov. You alone are responsible for their deaths. No one else.”
Tania swallowed hard. She felt immersed in dizzying, rocking waves of dread, as though she’d again been flung into the Volga.
“You didn’t get them all, Private. One of them crawled away to a mortar crew with the coordinates to your position.”
He balled his fist, “Your fucking position! You disobeyed my orders, you gave away your position and traded the lives of three of my snipers for seventeen infantrymen! Each of those snipers was worth a hundred Nazis. And you traded them for seventeen!”
Zaitsev pulled his face back, breathing hard through his nose. His wide-set eyes gouged into hers. She felt his pupils bearing down like the dark barrels of twin sniper rifles. Tania’s mind was blank, producing no thoughts of her own. Everything she heard or felt, all her senses, were in Zaitsev’s furious hands. Only a pulse of remorse cut to her surface to mingle with the mean flush in her cheek. All else waited.
Zaitsev shook his head. “We are not here to erase your memories, partisan. I don’t know what you’ve seen or what you’ve lost, but whatever it is, your pain is not greater than Russia’s.”
He pulled himself erect. “Russia’s, damn it! Not your pain, But Russia’s! You are in the Red Army! You are no longer fighting a one-woman war! Don’t ever forget this! Don’t ever! It was your stupidity and selfishness that murdered three Russian soldiers!”
He leveled a shaking, angry finger at her. “From this moment on, you will do what you are told to the letter or I’ll have Danilov put a bullet in the back of your brain! Do you understand me?”
Zaitsev spun on his heels and stomped from the room. He yanked the blanket from its nails when he flung it aside.
Tania slid down the wall. Tears welled in her eyes. She felt them slipping over her cheeks. The tears tapped on the backs of her hands, limp in her lap.
Tania closed her eyes. She tried to listen to her own sobbing, but her ears were full of Zaitsev’s anger. He’d screamed at her. He’d struck her.
She felt exiled from her body, floating beside it as if her spirit had become so full of grief and guilt she had to leave its bounds to contain it all. She looked down on herself, slumped there against the wall. She tried to feel pity for the weeping girl. All she felt was contempt.
I killed them, she realized. I, stupid and selfish, killed them. I am responsible. I am sitting here, crying, trembling, alive. And they are not.
She thudded her head against the wall. She searched for her voice to speak to the echoes of Zaitsev’s boots disappearing down the hall, to answer the image in her mind of Fedya lying broken beneath a smoking pile of rubble, his young poet’s eyes open, his stare no longer at this world.
She held her hands in front of her, making fists and releasing them, flexing the fingers until they hurt, as if she were clawing her way out of a dungeon. Pain delivered her back inside her body.
Her cheek glowed. She whispered, “I understand.”
* * * *
TWO
THE DUEL
* * * *
ELEVEN
THE PANZER GROWLED AROUND THE CORNER, ITS IRON hatches shut tight. Cautiously, the tank ground down the street, swinging its gray turret with a metallic whine. The crew inside looked for the Russians they knew were dug into the ruins ahead.
From behind, another panzer watched the progress of the lead tank, guarding it with a motionless cannon. Farther around the corner, out of view, an infantry unit waited to move in behind the tank cover.
A small explosion leaped from the second floor of a building at the far end of the street. A Russian 76 mm antitank gun had opened up at fifty meters and missed. The lead tank slammed into reverse and accelerated backward down the street, elevating its turret to the telltale flash of the antitank gunner’s discharge. Farther back, the idling guard tank fired an antipersonnel shell into the ruins. A squad of Nazi infantrymen jumped from their hiding places to rake the now revealed Russian position with bullets and grenades.
At this moment in the battle, the way he’d learned over the past ten days on a dozen other streets like this, Corporal Nikki Mond raised his binoculars to the rooftops and teetering facades above the clatter. There, as if preordained, he spotted the bristles of Russian sniper rifles. They appeared only for a moment, like black thorns protruding from the buildings. With the sounds of distant, single pops, they picked off the German infantry one by one.
Nikki knew these sharpshooters had lain motionless for hours, since before dawn, in the eaves of those skeletal buildings. During this first week of November, what the soldiers had taken to calling “the quiet days,” Nikki had grown aware of the increasingly deadly presence of enemy snipers. With the faltering of the Luftwaffe and the prevalence of smaller-scale battles, these silent assassins of the Red Army seemed to have crept into every crevice along the front line.
Nikki had witnessed several occasions where the action escalated from this point, each side calling in more and heavier weapons. If for some reason they did not, then the furor
always settled down, with the dead left lying in full view. The wounded had to drag themselves to cover, then stay where they were until dark, unable even in their agony to cry out for help for fear that the snipers above or a creeping Ivan would finish them off. During the “quiet days,” few prisoners were being taken.
This tedious taking and giving of alleys, streets, and buildings had become for the combatants of both armies the real battle of Stalingrad. Instead of the major confrontations of September and October spent pounding against the thin Russian beachhead, all the actions mounted now were disjointed local clashes at the company level, with each side trying to improve its position meter by meter. The bitter siege had become a grim bog, allowing only slow, torturous steps.
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