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

by David Robbins

  Before the Jungdo, there had been no spot on earth other than the shooting range Heinz Thorvald could claim to have truly made his own. He’d been a stranger to Germany all his life, invisible and disenfranchised.

  Now he felt like an heir to the planet.

  In November of 1933, his father approached him with news. The baron had secured for his son a captain’s rank in the SS, the Nazi Party’s own armed forces. His assignment would be as an ordnance officer, attached to the armory in Berlin. The Baron assured Heinz that his peacetime duties would include little more than participating on the SS’s sharpshooting team and putting on displays of marksmanship for recruitment festivals. Heinz embraced his father and accepted.

  For six years, SS Captain Heinz Thorvald developed his marksmanship skills. During the week, he refined the static shot, lengthening his distance eventually to one thousand meters with a 6X scope. On weekends, he honed his skills on the skeet field, swinging the heavier duck guns; he won dozens of contest and awards for the SS. Evenings were spent among books or attending the opera, especially those by Wagner.

  There had been some women in Heinz’s life. Their chief purpose had been to admire his manner. The prospect of loving a woman and sharing himself scared him; he used his loyalty to the Aryan cause to silence the whispers of worry and fright inside him. “The world,” he told each woman when her string had run out, “is not right just yet for commitment to other than the Fatherland.” Sipping a coffee and cognac after an evening at the opera, he told the girls the times were turbulent and tumbling.

  “Not now,” he’d sigh, looking away. “Maybe ... I don’t know.”

  Nineteen forty-one marked his eighth year in the army. Though Germany had been at war for two years, Heinz had spent only ten weeks on actual battlefields, in two campaigns: the invasion of Poland, where he’d sat at six hundred meters, knocking off frightened, defeated Poles across open battlefields, and Dunkirk, shooting a hundred retreating English and French soldiers waiting for rescue over the English Channel. In each case, Thorvald had fired with impunity from remarkable distances, confident that no marksman on the other side could counter him or even endanger him. In Poland and France, he’d collected over three hundred confirmed kills. He was ever thankful to be so safe in war, to be a sniper.

  His impressive number of kills combined with his family’s influence to secure for him a promotion to colonel. By the summer of 1941, the German war effort in Europe had shifted to the occupations of conquered nations and the relentless bombing of Britain. Very little ground action was taking place on the continent. Thorvald agreed to head a sniper school outside Berlin in the small town of Gnössen. He had SS engineers construct a state-of-the-art shooting range and skeet field, touting that skill in both disciplines was needed for accurate as well as fast aim. Thorvald hoped he would spend the duration of the war in Gnössen. He’d breakfast with his father on Sundays and spend his week creating lethal snipers to go into conflict and perform bravely on his behalf. He set himself the task of becoming too useful as a teacher to be sent into the field again.

  Now the frosty Stalingrad wind slapped him out of his reverie, stirring again the sad sense in his breast that some promise had been broken. He stared down the steps of the river walk to the green Volga. The river was clotted with ghosts of ice floating under the surface. No boats are coming across that, he thought. Ostarhild told me about the Russians’ supply crisis. I’m here during a lull in the fighting, but it’s bound to increase the moment the Volga freezes and becomes first a giant footbridge and then a highway for the Reds’ supplies. I want Zaitsev dead and a seat on a plane home well before that.

  To the left of the steps were the ruins of shops; across the walkway were the remains of a row of statues and concrete fountains. All but one of the iron figures had been broken and knocked from their stands. At the end of the row, just before the cluttered boardwalk beside the Volga, stood a depiction of a Russian boy and girl. They held a sheaf of straw over their heads, the workers of the Soviet future. They seemed to Thorvald to be four hundred meters away.

  He took the rifle off his shoulder, looked down the scope, and added one-eighth for the shot downhill. Sensing the chilly clarity of the air, he subtracted twenty meters. The wind blew at him off the Volga, ruffling his hair under the white hood. Possibly eight knots. He gave the distance ten meters more.

  Thorvald crouched and brought the crosshairs onto the dark forehead of the iron statue boy. He aimed for the left eye and squeezed. The report of the rifle roared at the quiet facades on his left, then bounced back and raced past into the open park. It was his first shot in Stalingrad.

  He shortened his distance slightly when a trough in the wind appeared. He aimed and fired at the statue’s right eye. Looking through the sight, he could not determine his accuracy. Iron boys, he thought, do not fall down from bullets.

  Thorvald walked down the path to the statue. From this height above the river, he could see the huge islands splitting the Volga in half. Beyond the wide sand beach and evergreens on the islands were the flat plains of Russia, rolling away under the distant winter mist. He thought about how vast this land was. It could encompass Germany twenty times. He’d heard Hitler’s plans for Russia, announced from a hundred podiums. He enjoyed watching Hitler shout his speeches, fists waving, beating his buttons, shaking while the words flew from his mouth as though he were a cannon and the words artillery shells. We will conquer Russia west of the Volga, then Moscow will sue for peace and the war will end. We will call the land from Poland stretching east to the Volga “Ostland.” We will be its masters and populate it with our race. The Russians, the lowly Untermenschen, will serve us grapes and honey and chop wheat for our bread.

  When I leave, Thorvald thought, I won’t come back, even when it is Ostland. I don’t like this place, this gloom, this wind.

  Standing before the statue, Thorvald stepped over the low marble wall onto the fountain floor. A gown of snow from the night before lay on the bottom, making the surface slippery. He slid up to the figure of the boy and ran his finger over the ebony left eye. A gray smudge came off on his finger. The copper jacket of the round had flattened upon impact with the harder iron. The muddy smear was a splash mark from the lead core. He checked the other eye and found the lead mark low on the cheek. The rifle is true enough, he thought.

  Waiting at the top of the steps was the soldier he had requested that Ostarhild assign to him.

  “Good morning, Corporal,” he said. “How did you sleep?”

  “Sir?” The young man seemed taken aback by the question.

  “Just an inquiry. Manners. Like ‘How’s the weather?’ “

  The corporal reached for Thorvald’s rifle.

  “Yes, sir. I didn’t sleep that well. The lieutenant sent me out in the middle of the night to repair a phone line.”

  “Was it close to the Russian lines?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you repair it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Were you scared?”

  The corporal shook his head and spit in the dirt. “I’m always scared, Colonel. You get that way here.”

  Thorvald walked alongside him into the street, north toward the Russian lines.

  “Why aren’t you carrying your rifle?”

  “I figured today we were just going to look the front lines over, sir. If you want, I’ll go get it.”

  Thorvald shook his head. “No. Don’t worry. We won’t get close enough to the Reds to get in any trouble. Let this Zaitsev work along the front lines with his balls in the mud. From the articles I read, he seems to be addicted to it. Besides,” he added, clapping the boy on the shoulder, “I don’t need to be so close to him as he needs to be to me.”

  The two walked in silence through the ruins. The corporal seemed quite certain of where he was going and knew the best routes to get there. Thorvald marveled at the destruction of the city. This was devastation, absolute and complete. There was nothing left whole.
The buildings were mangled, ripped apart. Who could fight in this? Who could hold out through this?

  The Russian wind seemed to say to him, I can. Thorvald huddled into his coat.

  He waved his white-gloved hand at the ruins. “Where do you think he is, Corporal?”

  Mond spread a map of the city on the ground. The colonel knelt beside him.

  “Look here, sir. We’ve split the Russian force into three parts.” Mond sketched with his finger three rings on the map.

  “Here,” he said as he pointed into the first, northernmost circle, “in Rynok above the Tractor Factory, they’ve got a full division. South of there, in the Red October factory, we’ve fought right through the middle of them all the way to the Volga, isolating this force.” He jabbed the finger down into the Red October circle. “This small pocket deep in the shops is almost impossible to break.”

  Mond looked up from the map. “I’ve seen the Russians take artillery pieces apart in there, drag them through the rubble to the front line, then put them back together and blow us to bits.”

  The corporal laid his fingertip on the southeast corner of the Red October. He traced a line west from the building to the eastern slope of Mamayev Kurgan, the hill that commanded a view of the city. From there, he slid his hand south to encompass the Lazur chemical plant, the rail yards, and ten kilometers of riverfront to a point north of the main landing stage.

  Thorvald looked up from the map into the top of Mond’s head. The corporal did not take his eyes from the map.

  “Where is he, Corporal?”

  “My guess is he’s in this southern pocket, the largest one.”

  “Why do you think he’s there?”

  “It’s just a guess, but it gives him the most room to move, the most targets. He could get trapped in one of these smaller pockets. And I don’t think they would want that. Besides, it’s mostly a stalemate right now in these smaller areas. Zaitsev has over a hundred and forty kills. I think he’d want to work where he can find the most game.”

  “Game? Why do you say game?”

  Mond shrugged as if to express how simple the logic was.

  “He’s a hunter from Siberia. That’s how he thinks. He hunts. Sir, did you read the articles from In Our Country’s Defense?”

  Thorvald nodded. “Yes, Corporal, some. Not all of them. I perused them. Let’s say I got the highlights.”

  The corporal lowered his eyes.

  Thorvald responded quickly. “I’ll read them all, I assure you. I was tired yesterday.”

  “It’s all right. They’re mostly brag.”

  “You say Zaitsev sees us as game. I take it you’ve read the articles. What kind of game are we to him?”

  Mond studied the question, then answered. “Wolves. Siberian timber wolves. He thinks he’s got us figured out. The Germans do this, the Germans do that. He reads tactics and routines like tracks, like we’re animals.”

  “Then,” Thorvald said, rising, “we will behave like Siberian timber wolves. We’ll be dangerous but conventional. We’ll let him think he has us figured out. And then we’ll spring a surprise on him.”

  Thorvald smiled, liking what he was creating for the young corporal. After all, Zaitsev was right. The German sharpshooters were predictable. Thorvald knew it; he’d been the instructor for many of the snipers Zaitsev killed. He was certain they’d behaved like animals here in Stalingrad: dull and predictable. He’d seen it in their eyes while training them in Gnössen, the careless Aryan confidence of the Nazi youth, boys ruling the world before they’d fired the first shot. No respect for the enemy. No longer any respect for the power of fear. They’d fought in the streets with knuckles and beer bottles and considered those city squabbles to be their crucibles, their proof under fire. These young snipers entered the war already sure they were brave, convinced that the world waited to open before their courage like gates to a password. “Just show me how to do it” was all they seemed to want from him in training—”I’ll take care of the rest, old man.” They’d forgotten that fear, not the bullet or the bomb, is the most devastating weapon of war.

  Hitler has taken fear away from the German people, Thorvald thought; that’s the Führer’s greatest power. He’s almost done that for me, almost freed me from it.

  “And this Zaitsev,” he mused while Mond folded the map. “We’ll treat him like a duck. We’ll hide ourselves in a blind and then flush him into the open. We’ll make him fly from fright and then shoot him down in a burst of feathers.”

  Thorvald looked at the corporal, who turned to walk north toward the Lazur plant and no-man’s-land.

  “I’m certain we can make Zaitsev come to us.”

  Mond nodded.

  “The key,” he said, “is to let him know I’m here.”

  The corporal’s face dropped. “How . . .” The boy hesitated. “How can we do that, Colonel?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll think of something, you and I.”

  * * * *

  THIRTEEN

  TANIA LOOKED UP FROM HER JOURNAL AT THE SOUND OF metal clanging against the bunker. A tin mess plate clattered on the dirt floor. Sidorov, a young private with the sniper unit for only two weeks, had thrown the plate at Shaikin.

  The two men’s voices swelled. She stared across the room at them, both standing, ready for blows.

  Zaitsev and Kulikov jumped to the two antagonists. Chekov did not move.

  Kulikov took Shaikin’s arm to pull him back. Zaitsev stepped between the two flushed faces.

  “Shut up! Both of you!” Zaitsev shouted over them. He turned to Shaikin. “Ilya! What’s going on?”

  Shaikin yanked his arm out of Kulikov’s grip. He rammed his finger at Sidorov. “I’ve had enough of this bastard! He’s got seventy kills and he thinks it makes him a hotshot. He’s over here running his mouth. But he’s padding his kills.”

  Sidorov laughed. “You’re a jealous son of a bitch.” He said to Zaitsev, “He’s only got thirty-six and he’s mad at me. He ought to be mad at himself.”

  Shaikin snatched his sniper journal off the floor and shoved it at Zaitsev. “Here,” he seethed, “look for yourself. Every one is a machine gunner, a spotter, a sniper, or an officer. Every one a priority target!” Shaikin glared at Sidorov. “Go ahead, hotshot! Show him your journal.”

  Shaikin wheeled on Zaitsev. “You know what he does? He shoots foot soldiers during an attack instead of machine gunners or officers. He’s supposed to be protecting the troops, but he’s just racking up kills for himself. He’s a fucking menace.”

  Zaitsev faced Sidorov. He asked quietly, “And?”

  The skinny private’s eyes blinked with his own anger.

  “That’s crap!” He pointed out through the bunker wall to the battlefield. “The machine guns aren’t operating in my sector. I shot one gunner a week ago and they haven’t replaced him. This lying dick is just too slow to get seventy kills, and he’s mad at me about it.”

  Zaitsev handed Shaikin’s journal back to him without looking through it.

  “Go sit down, Ilya.”

  Shaikin slumped on the floor next to Tania. He slapped his hands in his lap.

  Zaitsev spoke now with Sidorov. “You have seventy kills. That’s excellent. You know I have twice that many.”

  “Excellent for you as well, Chief Master Sergeant.”

  “And what do you think,” Zaitsev asked, “of Shaikin’s thirty-six kills? Truthfully.”

  Sidorov shrugged as if to say he would have chosen diplomacy but the Hare specified he wanted the truth.

  “I cannot say the same, Chief Master Sergeant.”

  “Shaikin is not excellent?”

  Shaikin tensed. He moved to push himself off the floor. Tania laid a hand on his arm.

  Sidorov shook his head with dramatic reluctance.

  “Comrade Sidorov,” Zaitsev said, raising his chin, “you will transfer from this unit immediately.”

  Sidorov stepped back as if pushed. “Chief Master Sergeant, w
hat? . . .”

  “There’s no room for your attitude in the hares, Sidorov. We are a small group and we are Communists. We do not bicker over personal achievements. Excellence is not measured in numbers or scores. Private Shaikin doesn’t need seventy kills to be as good a sniper as you. Dismissed.”

  Zaitsev stared at the private. He and Sidorov were close in size, but Zaitsev seemed by far the bigger man.