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

by David Robbins

  He looked into her face and breathed with her sighs. He no longer led her hand but rode it, going where she pleased; he was saddled to her movements.

  Zaitsev watched Tania bring herself to a climax. In a climbing quiver, she reached up with her free hand and pulled him down to kiss his face in the rhythms of her body. She pushed her stomach higher, pressing her thighs together over their hands. Within moments, her back flexed into an arch until she lay back with a heaving chest.

  She opened her eyes. In her stillness, he felt the attention his own body clamored for now.

  “Vasha,” she whispered, “go with me tomorrow.”

  He looked down her length. Her knees were up. The smoothness of her legs ached inside him, pushing to come out.

  “That’s the way of the taiga,” he whispered. He moved above her, sliding his knees between hers.

  “The animals mate.” He lowered himself. “Then they hunt.”

  * * * *

  MAMAYEV KURGAN’S SCARS SHOWED UNDER THE MORNING light. The snow, which had fallen until dawn, did not hide the slashes of trenches or fill the craters that gave its eastern slope the look of a moonscape. The frost glistened diamond flashes in Zaitsev’s scope while his crosshairs glided over sector six.

  “Look at the top of the hill,” Tania said. “There’s no snow on it. I hear it’s because the ground stays so warm up there from all the shelling.”

  Mamayev Kurgan commanded a view of the city and the Volga. Three months earlier, in August, Red soldiers standing atop the water towers on the hill’s crest first saw the dust of the German army’s advance tanks speeding over the steppe. This morning, Zaitsev knew, Nazi spotters were in command of the summit. The two armies had traded the hill several times, never keeping it for long, always attracting the worst the enemy had to dish out in order to regain the crest. The hill had been peppered with artillery shells so often and with such ferocity that the ground of Mamayev Kurgan carried within it an extra, pregnant heat.

  Zaitsev and Tania hunkered down in a trench on the western edge of no-man’s-land. Before them was an impossible maze of broken machinery, abandoned guns, and pitted earth. Bodies lay under the hummocks of small snowdrifts.

  Zaitsev pulled the periscope from his backpack to scan deeper into the rising field in front of them. He thought, I’ve got to make something happen. He knew the hunting would be slow on Mamayev Kurgan. The fighting had been so intense, so nonstop that anyone left alive here probably knew how to stay that way. He didn’t want to spend days with Tania helping her get her first kill as sector leader.

  For a silent hour he peered through the periscope at the German breastworks. Tania crawled fifty meters away to look from a different angle and to avoid being conspicuous. The shadows shortened with the sun rising at their backs. The reflections from the glistening snow dulled. Twice, Zaitsev saw what might have been sniper movement. A wisp of cigarette smoke disappeared quickly; it might have been snow drifting on the wind. Moments after, near the same spot, he thought he glimpsed a helmet bobbing once, then twice, above the trench. This, too, vanished before he could focus on it.

  Zaitsev was acquainted with waiting. But something about Chernova drove him at a faster clip. Her eager energy distracted him from his discipline, though she made no overt demands or even showed any hints of impatience with him. She has a heat, he thought, like a stove or the top of Mamayev Kurgan. Things boil up around her.

  He set down the periscope and lit a cigarette, breaking a major rule of sniper engagement. He felt aggravated, restless.

  Well, he thought, there’s something I’ve been wanting to try for a while. Why not this morning?

  He shouldered his rifle and crawled to where Tania squatted below her periscope. She did not look away from the eyepiece when he approached.

  “You’re smoking,” she said.

  “Stay here. I’m going to get Danilov.”

  Tania’s head snapped around. “What? Why do that? He’s no good up here. Leave him alone.”

  “I have a plan. Stay here.” Zaitsev raised a finger at her. “And don’t shoot a fucking thing. Understand?”

  He wagged his finger at her hard to make his point and turned to steal back to the Lazur.

  * * * *

  “SET IT UP RIGHT HERE.”

  Zaitsev stacked more bricks on the two piles he’d built above the trench. He stepped out of the way for Danilov to place the loudspeaker behind the brick mound on the left. The commissar let the bell of the speaker stick out a few centimeters to the right and pointed it up the hill toward the German lines.

  Danilov unrolled the coiled cord between the microphone and the speaker. He sat on the trench floor with an effort and clicked the trigger on the microphone twice. The speaker blared to loud, tinny life.

  “Wait.” Zaitsev held up his hand. “Wait for my signal, as we discussed.”

  Zaitsev crawled on all fours to Tania. She stared at him, the rifle and periscope across her lap.

  “So?” she asked.

  Zaitsev made a quick study of her face. Her checks were flushed with the chill. A ring from the periscope showed around her right eye. Her lips held no smile but were left sour and pouting, the remnants of her one-word question to him: so?

  He paused, appreciating her effect on him, her combination of beauty and will. He’d left her for ninety minutes on his trek back to the Lazur for Danilov. She’d had all that time to do nothing but stare up the slope. The stove, he thought, has warmed while I was gone.

  He whispered. “Just do what I tell you, partisan.” He glanced back at Danilov. “Our little commissar is really quite good at his job, you know. And his job is agitating. In a minute, he’s going to get on his bullhorn and read some very nasty leaflets in German his brother politrooks have prepared. I suspect Danilov’s German is not so good, but it’s probably good enough to make every Nazi within earshot angry as hornets. Maybe just with his pronunciation, who can tell?”

  Zaitsev grinned at his own jest. The corners of Tania’s mouth lifted. A small blue wave broke in her eyes.

  “My guess,” he continued, “is that we’re going to be in a shooting gallery soon after he turns it up. You go twenty meters to the left, and I’ll stay near Danilov. If there’s sniper fire, it’ll probably be in my direction. I’ll be set up for it; I’ve got a little trick I’m going to try. Anything else, machine guns probably, I think you’ll see first. Any shots you get, take them. We move one minute after the first shot, either yours or mine.”

  “Vasha.” Tania held out her hand, palm up as if to accept a coin. “You always say a sniper must guard the secrecy of his position.” She pointed at Danilov to demand an explanation for the commissar and his loudspeaker.

  “Exactly.” Zaitsev grinned. “And that’s why today we try the unexpected.” He reached into her lap for her periscope. He laid it across her open hand, dropping his smile with the scope. “You wanted a hunt. Let’s hunt.”

  He crawled away to set up his subterfuge, the stuffed cotton dummy he’d carried from the Lazur. He propped the dummy up behind the second, right-hand pile of bricks, moving it forward and to the left just far enough so that its helmet would be visible only in a roughly twenty-degree span to the southwest. Finally, he stuck a pipe behind the dummy’s back to hold it in place.

  Zaitsev had not been a frequent user of the dummies. No one in the hares was. The opposite was their specialty, as Tania had correctly cited: the hares strove to be invisible. A dummy was designed to draw attention to itself, a feint. The dummies were better for Viktor’s line of work; the bears’ style was a more confrontational one. He’d actually heard of Viktor’s boys leaping out of their shooting cells during combat and charging. Not the way snipers should work, Zaitsev thought, but he would never tell Viktor Medvedev how to hunt or what to teach. But charging and shouting were not for Zaitsev’s little, lithe assassins. Still, the dummies were always available. Their production had become an underground cottage industry for the thousand or so native Staling
rad women left in the city. Zaitsev held a mental picture of them sitting in a circle beneath a lantern in a covered shell hole or a basement, stitching dummies out of old blankets, stuffing them with mattress filling, giving the dummies names. This was how these old women fought, with needle and thread. Zaitsev was glad now to use one of their creations. He named it Pyotr and patted it on the shoulder.

  Satisfied with the setup, Zaitsev took a position ten meters to the right of the dummy. With his pack shovel, he dug a slit in the lip of the trench. He placed a brick on either side of the channel for an embrasure. He laid his tied-up gloves in the trough and his rifle on top of them to face the twenty-degree arc he’d baited with the head of the dummy, Pyotr’s head. He gave a thumbs-up to Danilov, who waited on the trench floor.

  The commissar flicked the switch on the microphone and blew into it. The speaker pitched a noise into the air like a tree splitting. He had it turned up very loud.

  The commissar arranged a few pages in his lap and brought the microphone close to his mouth to begin the propaganda. Zaitsev listened to the foreign tongue spit out through the loudspeaker. He’d never encountered German before he came to Stalingrad. When he’d finally heard it from prisoners and deserters, or on the lips of the dying, or screamed during close combat in the houses downtown, he’d judged it an ugly language, a battle tongue. German was spoken back in the throat, bitten and chewed with the teeth. By contrast, he considered Russian to be liquid; it was a language to be cradled on the lips, swirled in the mouth like cognac. Russian could be whispered through a keyhole to a lover on the other side to stroke her into unlocking the door. German was the language to knock the door down. It was how you spoke to your dog or cleared your throat.

  Zaitsev looked past Danilov to Tania. She surveyed the field from behind cover through her periscope. He chose to scan through his rifle scope. The 4X rifle sight offered a smaller range than the periscope, but the optics were better for clearer definition. He swiveled slowly across his expected target range. Though the morning was aging, the sun was still behind him.

  Danilov’s amplified voice tore the air. The hard German consonants, sharpened by the loudspeaker, banged out an edgy echo flung against the hillside. That’s obnoxious, thought Zaitsev, even if they can’t understand a word he’s saying.

  The pamphlets in Danilov’s lap were of the sort used by both sides, usually dropped from the air over the battlefield. The leaflets were a common sight, blowing across the ground between the two facing armies as if scurrying out of the way.

  Zaitsev looked up from his scope. The rising landscape seemed void of life. Danilov’s voice sailed over it like cawing electric buzzards. No movement at all. But Zaitsev knew that the depressions and gashes on all sides of him held soldiers and guns, German and Russian. He’d learned months ago never to be deceived by calm in Stalingrad.

  He brought his eye back down to his scope. After a few moments of searching, he noted the barely visible barrel of a Nazi machine gun 350 meters away. It was not manned. That meant nothing. It could have been jammed and abandoned. It could just as easily be a fake position made of wood; it might also be a working machine gun with its crew hidden in the trench while a camouflaged spotter kept watch. Nothing is what it seems out here, thought Zaitsev. The softness of the snow is just a sheath over a jagged hillside. The stillness, seemingly blind, has a hundred eyes. Danilov’s crackling voice even appears to come from a man’s form that is actually a stuffed dummy.

  Suddenly Zaitsev heard the thumping of bullets plow into the earth and bricks around the loudspeaker. The chattering of a machine gun flew past him. Danilov broke off his shouting; Zaitsev glanced from his scope quickly to the commissar, who was curled on the floor of the trench. He had dropped the microphone to shield his head with both hands from the brick shards and dirt falling on him while the machine gun raked the loudspeaker. In the heart of the action, Pyotr stood unscathed behind his bricks.

  Zaitsev hunted to his left through the scope. The machine gun he’d seen moments before was still quiet. The gun firing at the loudspeaker must be operating to his right, outside his targeted killing zone. Before he could lift his rifle out of its slit, he heard Tania fire.

  The machine gun fell silent.

  Good. She got the bastard. One minute.

  Zaitsev glanced at his watch.

  Another machine gun came alive, aiming not at the loudspeaker but far to his left. Tania! They’ve spotted her.

  Zaitsev rammed his eye against the scope and found the unmanned machine gun. It now had the head and hands of a soldier planted behind it, flailing away at Tania’s position. Another German was beside the gunner, binoculars up.

  Zaitsev exhaled to push his pulse out of his head. He watched the gunner work, to let the target take over his thoughts, away from the battle pitch. Let him draw the bullet. Let him open up for it. There’s no hurry. Make it good. One shot. One squeeze.

  Without anticipating it, the rifle jumped into his shoulder. He heard the loud report of the bullet on its way. This was how he accomplished his best shots: without telling himself “now” but simply thinking the bullet into the target, pulling the trigger on instinct, surprising himself a little.

  In his scope, the gunner’s helmet whipped backward when he fell from the gun. One of the soldier’s hands caught in the grips. The gun swung upward under the hanging weight of the dead Nazi, still firing, bullets blasting into the air. The spotter pulled the snagged fingers free, then ducked behind the trench wall and, with the body of his comrade, dropped from sight.

  Zaitsev gathered up his periscope and pack and scuttled to where Danilov sat dusting himself off. Bits of red brick and dirty snow lingered on his shoulders and fur hat.

  Tania arrived, her rifle and gear in her hands, ready to go.

  “Good work,” Zaitsev said, kneeling beside the commissar. Danilov smiled, gathering his spilled pages. He dug between his legs and pulled the microphone out of the dirt.

  “That worked well,’ Zaitsev continued. “But we need to get out of here now.”

  “Go? Why? I’m not finished.”

  Danilov’s smile tightened and flattened like a pulled string. He pressed the microphone trigger and blew into it. The loudspeaker sizzled to life.

  “I’ve got a bit more to say to you whores!” he shouted in Russian. His voice emerged from the battered bell with a buzz. Zaitsev was amazed the thing still worked.

  “No. That’s not a good idea.” Zaitsev pushed the microphone down from the commissar’s lips. “Our game worked well. Very well. Now it’s time to go. Remember, we’re on the front line.”

  “I know perfectly well where we are.”

  “Then you know we’d better move, and now.”

  As Zaitsev finished his sentence, his eyes locked onto Tania’s face on the other side of Danilov. She heard it, too. The whining, falling whistle of a mortar shell.

  Zaitsev grabbed Danilov by the lapels of his coat. He flung the commissar onto his face on the trench floor and dug down beside him.

  The ground bucked with the explosion. The first shell landed above them, blowing shrapnel and shock waves past the top of the trench. More eruptions followed. Dirt rained onto their backs, pattering on the crowns of their helmets.

  They waited with faces in the dirt through six explosions. The ground shuddered with each shell. When he sensed the bombardment was finished, Zaitsev tugged on Tania’s leg. She raised her head.

  Danilov reared up. Dirt and snow stuck to his mouth and eyebrows. He spit once to clear the debris from his lips.

  “Comrade Zaitsev,” he said, “I agree. We should go.”

  The three gathered their equipment. Danilov collected pages off the ground. Zaitsev grabbed at a few sheets to speed the commissar. He looked up at Pyotr. The dummy had stood through the barrage, the pipe firmly in his back.

  With all his papers in hand, Danilov wound up the cord for the microphone and pocketed it. He reached his hand over the top of the trench to pull down th
e loudspeaker.

  A bullet ricocheted off a brick lying just below the bell, splitting it into bits and dust. Danilov fell to the floor of the trench as if scalded. Tania and Zaitsev stooped quickly.

  The commissar stared into Zaitsev’s eyes. “What was that? Who the hell’s shooting?”

  “Stay low,” Zaitsev replied.

  He snagged his backpack and scrambled with it to the right. He pulled out his periscope and hoisted the mirror and lens above the top of the trench. Surveying the field quickly, he saw nothing of note against the rumpled white slope but the two dead machine gun positions.

  He lowered the periscope. Just a German sniper who got caught napping, he thought. We woke him up with the broadcast and artillery and now he wants to get in on the show a little late. He figured he’d wait for someone to retrieve the loudspeaker. Clever move. I would’ve done the same. But I wouldn’t have fired at a hand. I would’ve waited for a head.