The voice gave a command in Russian, and the light came back into Nikki’s eyes. The hand released its pull on his face.
“Tell me, Corporal. Who is Thorvald?”
Nikki closed his eyes to think. Tell them. It doesn’t matter. Thorvald’s just one man; you’re not giving away any big troop movements or secret plans. Tell them. It won’t help them.
“Thorvald,” he said, gasping, “is a colonel. An SS colonel. He was sent here from Berlin to kill one of your snipers.”
The voice gave another order in Russian. The gold-toothed executioner behind Nikki moved in front, turning the knife over and over in his hand.
“Which one of our snipers?” asked the voice.
Nikki blinked into the beam. “Zaitsev. The Hare.”
The Reds whispered in buzzing tones. The golden grin appeared close to Nikki’s face again, blocking the light. His eyes were intent and his head skewed, again like the attentive dog.
The grin spoke. “Otkuda ty znayesh pra Zaitseva?”
Another voice translated. “How do you know about Zaitsev?”
“He’s been written about in your newspapers. They tell us everything about him.”
The three conferred in whispers. The man in the German uniform pointed at Nikki with his knife several times. One head wagged back and forth. The other, the interpreter, stood still, listening to the arguments of the other two. The decision clearly belonged to this man.
The gold-toothed one knelt beside Nikki to stare into his profile. He leaned on his knife and twisted it into the floorboards.
“When did this SS colonel arrive?”
“Yesterday.”
“Is he good?”
Nikki nodded. The pain in his neck was rising again.
“He said he is. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him shoot. But he’s the head of the Berlin sniper school, the special one in Gnössen. The generals asked for him specifically. They flew him in to get Zaitsev. They say he’s the best. That’s all I know.”
“The head of the German sniper school?” The interpreter told this to his comrades. The gold-toothed man frowned and shook his head at Nikki’s ear.
The leader rubbed his stubbly chin. “Hmmm. That is interesting, Corporal.” His voice carried a musing tone. “A German supersniper, sent from Berlin to kill the Russian supersniper. Yes, that is interesting.”
He paused to fold his arms across his chest. “But I do not believe it is all you know.”
Nikki searched quickly for something more, any detail that might tip the scale. He’d just met Thorvald. He knew only what was discussed in Ostarhild’s office.
“He says he’s a coward. He wants me to be his guide.”
The interpreter laughed at this. He told the other two.
He motioned for the man beside Nikki to come. The two in Russian garb shouldered submachine guns while the grinning one in the German uniform hefted a long rifle with a telescopic sight and walked toward Nikki, holding the knife.
He reached down and cut Nikki’s hands free, leaving his feet bound. He leveled the barrel of the rifle at Nikki’s forehead and pulled back the bolt. A bullet popped into the air. His hand flicked out and caught it.
He dropped the shell down to Nikki.
“Vot, dai etomu trusu. A sledushuyu on poluchit v lob.”
He put the knife in its scabbard, then turned for the open sliding door of the coal car.
The interpreter stood before Nikki. He cut off the flashlight. In the darkness, the soldier spoke.
“He said, ‘Here, give this to the coward. The next one he gets will be in his forehead.’ Goodbye, Corporal.”
The Russians jumped out of the door.
Nikki untied the rope from his feet. Once free, he crawled to the door to stare into the shades of night, straining his senses for any trace of his captors in the rail yard. Faced with no other choice, he slid out of the car and walked into the open.
They’re gone, he thought. They left me alive.
Nikki blew out a breath. He stroked the warm metal of the Russian bullet in his hand. He pressed his index finger onto its point, feeling the ease with which it could pierce flesh. He dropped the bullet.
In the dark, on his hands and knees, he groped until he found his flashlight, wire strippers, and black tape in the dirt where he’d left them.
He repaired the break in the line through the throbbing in his head.
* * * *
TWELVE
HEINZ THORVALD OGLED HIS IMAGE IN THE HANDHELD mirror. This was his third morning in a row without shaving since he’d left Gnössen. Grow a beard while you’re here, he thought. That Russian wind has needles in it.
He looked at his naked body. He always slept nude. It felt warmer pulling the blankets around his bare legs and under his chin. He had slept well the previous night on the cot in the storeroom Ostarhild had prepared for him, but more from fatigue than comfort.
Thorvald set down the mirror. He rubbed his stomach with both hands. His white skin held a reddish cast, the scarlet hue of childhood freckles still visible from head to toe. His shoulders and chest were soft. A layer of fat cushioned the lines of his muscles and bones like a jacket of snow. His waistline seemed to pout as if it were sticking out a lip.
He slapped his belly and jiggled it once to tell it he was going to give it some bread and jelly out of his bag in a few minutes. He gathered up the fatigues Ostarhild had sent at his request and pulled them on.
An opened wooden crate rested at the foot of the cot. Thorvald reached through the straw packing and lifted the canvas sack containing the new Mauser Kar 98K. He slid the rifle from the sack and undid the factory wrapping of oil paper. He felt the slickness of the packing grease and oil, the smell as sweet to him as morning coffee.
Thorvald broke the gun down, the stock, the bolt, the trigger assembly. He had an orderly bring him a basin of hot soapy water, then placed the parts in the suds. He shook out the canvas sack to rid it of straw and dust and laid it across the bed. After wiping the rifle parts down with clean rags, he set each on the sack and gave the metal bits a light coat of gun oil. He held the barrel up to the window and peered down it. Deep in the center was a single speck of dust, like a lone camel in a vast blue and perfect desert. Thorvald swabbed it out, looked again, and set the barrel on the sack.
He reassembled the rifle and washed his hands. He took off the oily fatigues and threw them in a corner. From his duffel bag he arrayed his clothes on the bed, dressing slowly, donning first his winter undergarments. He enjoyed the gathering warmth of each article: black cotton socks, gray-green woolen pantaloons, black wool turtleneck and large-cord sweater, then his insulated high boots. Last, he took out the reversible padded coat and hood, green on one side, white on the other. His white mittens were inside the pockets. He unrolled a pair of reversible drawstring pants and tossed them on the bed beside the coat.
After savoring three slices of pumpernickel slathered with Black Forest cherry jam from his duffel, he took up a small chamois sack holding his Zeiss 6X telescopic sight with crosshair reticle. He locked the scope into place.
Thorvald pulled on the pants and parka, white side out. Dressed and fed, he rubbed the blond stubble on his chin. They’ll ask at the opera about the beard, he thought. I’ll tell them I grew it on a mission to the Eastern Front.
He walked into the hall carrying the Mauser and a box of shells. He passed Ostarhild’s office, looking in for a moment to find the lieutenant away. He noted that the brazier and the coffeepot were also gone. The lieutenant’s desk was a mess.
Outside, the first charcoal stains of dawn colored the sky. It’s going to be a heavily overcast day, he thought. Good. They tend to be warmer. The clouds keep the heat in.
He counted only ten soldiers walking in the square across from the department store and in the streets around him. No cars or motorcycles broke the early silence. He wondered that there was not more activity, though he knew he was for the most part a stranger to the administration of war. In fact, he d
id not know how it worked on the large scale, outside the narrow range of his crosshairs.
Heinz Thorvald had never played more than a very specific role in the German military. He’d been a prized sniper, a gifted Scharfschütze, from the first day he donned the black and silver of the Wehrmacht as a twenty-seven-year-old captain in 1933.
Before his fifteenth birthday, Heinz had been a champion youth marksman in his native Berlin. His father, Baron Dieter von Zandt Thorvald, was a renowned sportsman in the southern forests. The old man had once hunted duck and quail with Field Marshal von Hindenburg himself. Heinz grew up a member of the wealthy industrialist Krupp family, his mother’s clan, who held license to hunting grounds throughout Bavaria, and Heinz had been recognized early as a phenom with a shotgun.
But the boy’s passion was not in the fields alongside his father. The baying of the hunting dogs, the wet dawns in the marshes, and the gritty, bloody meat of the wild kill were not to his liking. Instead, his heart beat for the time he could spend on the shooting range. He preferred the camaraderie and comfort of the clubhouse, the applause of admirers, and the competition with his peers. His favorite afternoons came with the matches against those elder marksmen who wished to teach the talented pup a lesson and rarely did. Heinz won most of the competitions he entered from the ages of sixteen through twenty. The matches he lost did more to improve his shooting than his victories. He analyzed every errant shot down to painful detail and did not repeat those mistakes next time out.
As a young man, he turned his talents to trap shooting. His rifle of choice was the unpopular .410 small-bore rather than the more widely used 12 gauge. The shot pattern of the .410 was smaller. This rifle required more meticulous aim than the larger-bore guns. Heinz accepted this voluntarily as his handicap. In his mind, it evened the contests. It helped him focus his will. The 12 gauge destroyed the clay targets, turning them into sprinkles of dust. Heinz enjoyed using the .410 to simply break the clays, then watch them fall. He sometimes practiced by shattering with a second shot a falling piece of an already stricken target. No one in Germany could best Heinz. His movement from high to low targets was as smooth as the flights of the spinning clays themselves. His balance was remarkable, and his reflexes were like a mousetrap. The clays were flung into the air at the call of “pull” for a high target and “mark” for a low one. Heinz moved the barrel of the gun in behind, then ahead, of the “pigeons” sailing twenty meters away from him in the first second, fifty meters away after three seconds. He knocked them down as surely as if the disks had been flung against a wall.
In 1928, when he was twenty-two, a wave of strikes shuddered through Germany. From his family’s estate outside Berlin, Heinz sensed the unrest growing in the nation. His father, a veteran of the First World War, was a strong supporter of the military. Many times he told his son that the German army was the last lamp that could light the country’s path back to its former glories.
The baron joined a militant group of veterans, the Stahlhelme, or “Steel Helmets,” and marched with them in the Berlin streets against the encroachments of unemployment, the declining mark, the Weimar republican system, and the rising tide of Communism. He preached that the German people’s most valuable traits were their industriousness and the skill of the labor force. Because of what he saw as the Weimar politicians’ mishandling of the postwar peace, German workers were being laid off by the thousands. The nation was depressed. Its anchor of hard labor and daily production had been ripped from the shoal beneath, sending Germany adrift, the baron intoned often at dinner. Only a strong army could sink the anchor back into a firm purchase.
Heinz accompanied his father on a few of the Stahlhelme’s raucous, confrontational demonstrations. The rancor of the crowd scared him, and he quickly retired to the sanctuary of his library and the rifle range.
Five years later, in 1933, the Austrian Adolf Hitler came to power. The year before, Hitler had been at the forefront in the Nazi party’s election sweep. Hitler was now chancellor. His brown-shirted storm troopers, the Sturmabteilung, lock-stepped across the nation, which embraced the new nationalism. Hitler labeled both the Communists and the “Jewish terror” as the genesis of Germany’s woes.
In the first year under Hitler, Germany’s economy began to lurch forward like an engine that had sat idle for years and was suddenly oiled and cranked into action. The voices of dissent slowly disappeared when the Schutzstaffel, the SS, opened the first internment camps for political opponents. The nation began to shout as one, howling first at itself, then to the startled ears of the world. The voices in the streets were young with the renewed power of Germany rising again.
Heinz was enlisted by his father into the National Socialist Party, the Nazis. He was immediately scooped up by friends into the storm troopers. Hitler called this paramilitary organization, over half a million strong, his “political soldiers in the fight to take back the streets from the Marxists.” Heinz was subjected, through meetings and retreats, to an armylike discipline. He was ushered into the labyrinths of Hitler’s political aims and social suspicion of any thing or person termed “non-Aryan.”
Heinz became upset by the fervor of his mates. The storm troopers fought in the streets with fists and bottles against Communist sympathizers. They marched in rigid goose step in support of Hitler’s mad dashes through the halls of government. They were arrested for fighting, then smashed benches and threw telephones through the windows at the police stations. Heinz could not join in the violence. He was stalled by a fear he did not know he owned until the first time his mates rushed into a crowd of Reds. He’d stood on the edge of the melee, frozen on the sidewalk, pressed against a building by his sudden dread. He quit the brownshirts two months after joining and was branded a coward.
The baron was not willing to accept this label for his son and insisted that the error had been his. The storm troopers, he said, were simply too proletarian. Heinz was refined beyond the ken of those goons. The place for Heinz was the Jungdeutsche Orden, the German Youth Order, known as the Jungdo.
Here, young Heinz found an ideological home for the sons of the bourgeoisie. The Jungdo marched in goose step, but only because it was the fashion and they didn’t want to appear less committed to the National Socialist cause than the other groups. But unlike the Hitler Youth or the storm troopers, the Jungdo did not break ranks to run down a group of men and women carrying Communist slogans or throw rocks and bottles at Bolshevik speakers. Their uniforms carried no insignia or rank to deemphasize age and status. Instead of the storm troopers’ beer-sotted revelry, his group held brotherly and patriotic meetings. The members of the Jungdo carried themselves with the air of those bred to lead rather than skirmish. Heinz spent weekends on camping trips, engaged in sports and hikes. The Jungdo had a required reading list that closely tracked Hitler’s preferred authors. Heinz was introduced to the great philosopher Nietzsche’s belief that a self-willed, heroic superrace would emerge above conventional morality to sweep away worldly decadence. In Schopenhauer’s The World as Free Will, one of Hitler’s favorite bits of reading during World War I, Heinz encountered the idea of will as force. He marveled at the lessons of Darwinian selection and the unexpected parallels between math, physics, culture, and history set forth by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West.
Heinz’s enthusiasm for Hitler’s vision of Germany grew while he came to understand the influences behind the Führer’s ideas. Under the guidance of Jungdo speakers and late-night discussions with comrades, he realized the danger of the Red peril. He saw the Jew merchant as the throttling purse strings of an Aryan nation striving for economic daylight.
During the summer of 1933, Heinz’s life was filled with a sense of belonging he had not known before joining the Nazis. Though his family had always been a loving one and both his parents were children of wealth, Heinz had long walked only in the shadows of that love and privilege. He, like the other children of the estates, had become too accustomed to his position; he could no l
onger feel his life. If nothing else, he had this in common with the blue-collar workers and farm boys swelling the ranks of the storm troopers and Hitler Youth. The economy had slowed to such a crawl that the German youth felt isolated from itself. Their hopes and dreams had been mortgaged and their destinies shackled to the wreckage of the country’s past. This was not the same past their parents remembered, the age of imperial Germany. Rather, the young men and women of 1933 Germany had grown up in the decades after World War I, after defeat and shame, in a Germany now mired in a worldwide depression.
There had been no intellectual or philosophical harbor for him before the Jungdo. He’d read books, listened dutifully to speeches, and wandered thoughtfully through the wildflowers and fields, like the rest of his breed. But most of his opinions were ones he’d usurped from his father. Now, through his nightly classes, he was versed in German folklore. He was conversant in the words of Thomas Mann as well as the soaring rhetoric of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He attended the riveting spectacles of Wagner’s operas. He stood rapt in the middle of tens of thousands outside the capitol, the Reichstag, listening to Joseph Goebbels cry for “the struggle for Berlin.” He marched with his father and a quarter million Stahlhelme through the Brandenburg Gate, flying the swastika and eagle standards beneath the stare of the Führer himself. Just as his body had found the sporting regimen of trap and target shooting, his mind found Hitler.
War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] Page 18