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

by David Robbins

  Nikki pulled the knife from his boot. The colonel opened the coat and cut away the buttons on the sweater and the two shirts beneath.

  The fatal wound was on the boy’s hairless white breast, like a small crater on the ashen surface of the moon, below the left collarbone and near the heart. Thorvald took a pencil from his coat and inserted the tip a few millimeters into the wound. With his fingers, he worked the flesh around the hole, squeezing and kneading the muscles and skin.

  Without a word or a glance to Nikki, he examined the next four bodies in the same manner. Two more had head wounds; in both cases, Thorvald reached under the head to find that the Russian bullet had blasted out the back of the skull. The other two bore chest wounds. Thorvald inserted his pencil into each of these and wriggled it while working the swollen flesh around the hole.

  Nikki stood back, fascinated more by Thorvald’s sleuthing than the wrenching tedium of death.

  After ten minutes, Thorvald stood over the last of the seven shrouded corpses. He swept back its blanket. Nikki asked, “What have you found, Colonel?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  Nikki looked at the body. He expected to see another perforated skull with a neat black hole stitched in the cheek or forehead with black blood dribbling down like seasoned lava. If not, then a simple rip in the uniform over the heart.

  This body showed no marker of death. The head was unscathed. Thorvald stripped away the shirt. No wound spoiled the chest.

  Thorvald yanked back the blanket to expose the full corpse. He sliced the uniform away; the stiff flesh was stained a dusky reddish purple in the shoulder blades, buttocks, calves and heels, where the blood had settled.

  With his foot, Thorvald rolled the naked cadaver over. No holes appeared in the back. He raised his hands in frustration, then lifted the corpse again with his boot to turn it face up.

  The dead soldier rocked and Nikki glimpsed a spot darker than the boy’s hair just behind the right ear. It might have been a mole or a clump of dirt.

  He pointed. “Look at the neck. Behind the ear.”

  Thorvald trailed his fingers through the short brown hair, down the nape, and under the ear. He leaned down to peer closer at the dot in the back of the skull.

  “It’s an exit wound. Look here around the cavity. There’s no bruising, no abrasion ring.”

  The bullet had come out behind the boy’s ear. Its jacket had not flattened on impact to take the rear of the head with it when it left, the way it was supposed to do.

  But where did the bullet enter?

  Thorvald used the knife to pry open the mouth. The body’s lips were clamped tight from rigor mortis. With some twisting of the blade between the teeth, the frozen jaw muscles gave way.

  Nikki leaned over Thorvald’s shoulder to look at the face. The mouth, wide open now, seemed out of balance with the repose of the shut eyes and the still, hard body. The mouth appeared defiant, screaming even as the rest of the body was resolved to its end.

  Thorvald prodded with his pencil. He motioned to Nikki. “Look here.”

  He pointed at a chip in the left front tooth.

  Laying the pencil under the broken place on the tooth, he slid the point into the throat, into a hole at the back of the wind pipe. He let go of the pencil. It stood straight up.

  “He probably saw the sniper at the last second and tried to shout something. The bullet went in his mouth, clipped this tooth, and entered the back of the throat. It hit the top of the spine, probably cut it in two, then bounced out here under the ear.”

  Thorvald flicked the standing pencil with his fingertip. “This is the path of the bullet. It went in straight. He had his face turned at the sniper when the bullet struck. Let’s see. . . .”

  He fingered the hole beneath the ear, pulled the pencil from the mouth, and slid it into the neck. Again he kneaded the muscles and skin around the pencil.

  Thorvald studied the wound, then withdrew the pencil and pulled the blanket over the body. He patted the head once when it was covered.

  Still kneeling beside the body, Thorvald looked across the row of draped corpses. He spoke, addressing them: “The chest shots didn’t tell me much. Once a bullet hits the torso’s muscles and organs, it bounces around a lot. But . . .” He turned to Nikki. “Look here.”

  He turned back one of the blankets to reveal the pallid mound of a dead boy’s bosom. He circled the wound with his finger.

  “All the chest-wound entry holes are round,” he said. “That indicates a ninety-degree angle of entry.”

  He touched a blue and red bruise ring around the hole. “See this circle of color? When a bullet penetrates, the skin stretches and becomes scraped. Then the skin snaps back and leaves this bruise around the hole. This abrasion, like all the abrasions on the other chest wounds, is symmetrical.”

  Thorvald covered the body and stood straight, easing his back. He pointed with the pencil down the row and shook his head.

  “The head shots are useless. All except this last one. The mouth shot gave us a straight path in. I could only guess where he was looking when the bullet hit him. The exit wound was just under the ear, which tells me he was looking at ground level. If he’d been looking up, the exit would’ve been lower on the neck.”

  Judging by the angle of the exit wound in the last corpse, plus the even roundness of the entry wounds of the head shots and the abrasion rings on the chests, Thorvald concluded that the Red snipers were not in the buildings but on a level plain with the soldiers. If the snipers had been above, below, or to the side of the targets, the abrasion rings would have been wider on the side of the bullet’s entry, like a slash or skid mark, and the holes would be oval, not round. From the accuracy of the shots, Thorvald put the distance at medium for an experienced sniper, about three hundred meters. There were at least two snipers working the area, a spotter and a shooter. These Reds were good; the targets, according to Captain Manhardt, had exposed themselves for only a moment. The Reds were working close and unseen. This sort of killing was easy pickings.

  Thorvald gazed at the seven shrouds a last time. The soldiers beneath them were boys, all of them; none had looked older than Nikki.

  “These snipers are making sport.”

  Nikki led Thorvald through the wreckage to the aid station. He approached one of the nurses bending over an unconscious soldier. The man’s chest was wrapped in seeping red gauze.

  “Nurse, pardon me,” Nikki whispered.

  She kept her hands on the wounded soldier. The face she turned to Nikki was round and deeply lined. Her eyes and mouth were hung with the sort of soft flesh that holds exhaustion like a sponge.

  “The colonel and I need to talk with some of the men,” Nikki said. He looked at the bleeding soldier on the ground. “We want to know about the snipers who are working the railroad mound. Could you ask if any of the men were wounded there?”

  “There are no wounded from the railroad mound, corporal.” The nurse shook her head. “Every man shot there is dead.”

  Thorvald leaned down, quietly as a leaf falling.

  “Madam, tell me, please, were you at the railroad mound?”

  She turned her head to the soldier to wipe a froth of blood and spittle from his mouth. “Seven times. I carried them out.”

  Thorvald laid a gentle hand on the nurse’s arm. She stopped wiping the cloth across the soldier’s lips.

  “We’re here to fight the Russian snipers. We’re specialists. Will you help us?”

  The nurse laid the cloth on the soldier’s chest and stood. Nikki saw the stains on the front of her uniform. Her broad shoulders and chest were blotched with a rusted brown crust. She did carry them, he thought. She had lifted the bodies in the trench and carried them out. She laid them down and closed their eyes and covered them with blankets one by one.

  Thorvald spoke, deference in his voice. “If you could show us where those boys fell, it would help us determine where the snipers are. We won’t take long. You can come right back here.”r />
  She called to the other nurse. “Madeleine. This one goes next.” Pink bubbles boiled at the man’s lips.

  Outside, the woman ducked behind the frozen tank, then scurried to a pile of rubble. With a nimbleness that challenged Nikki to follow, she wended among debris heaps and mortar holes to halt behind an abandoned Russian truck with its roof burned off. In a burst across an open ten meters, she flew behind a line of ruined rail cars sitting atop a dirt mound one meter high.

  She slid into the trench behind the mound. Nikki followed and was relieved to have arrived without drawing the attention of the Red snipers.

  This nurse, Nikki thought, ran this route seven times in, stopping, ducking, waiting; then straining under the yokes of the dead men while she carried them out, dodging and weaving. We’re three hundred meters behind the lines, normally a safe distance. But the mere presence of Russian snipers in the area changes everything. Each step has to be careful and calculated or it’s an invitation to a bullet. When the Red snipers move in, you risk your life just to walk upright, just to peek over a trench. Every movement becomes strained and burdensome when enemy snipers are near; hot tension brands every second with the crosshairs.

  Once in the trench, gathered low behind the mound, Nikki turned to look for the colonel. Thorvald was thirty meters back, still hunched behind the chassis of the Red truck. Thorvald pawed the air. This meant that Nikki was to go on without him. He’ll be all right, Nikki thought. No sense risking my flight back to Germany across that open stretch. I can take care of this part without him.

  The nurse led Nikki through the trench. It ran the length of the rail mound, over two hundred meters. Five cars were spread out on the rail, somehow refusing to crumble off their steel undercarriages. Behind the cover of each car, a unit of a dozen or so soldiers sat assembled around a machine gun boxed in by sandbags. None of the five guns was manned.

  The nurse stopped at the first, second, and fifth of the units in the trench. At the first, she pointed down twice to the spots where she’d picked up bodies.

  Each of the seven times the nurse pointed, she said only, “Here.” Nikki asked if she could recall the order of her trips to the units. She could remember only the first two and the last two. He inquired what sort of wound had been suffered by each soldier she’d collected. She shook her weary head and looked away down the trench to the next unit. Nikki stopped asking.

  He knelt among the men to question them about the sniper attacks. Had they seen anything? What had they heard, what was the sound that had made the soldiers look? Had it been the same sound each time before a sniper shot? Had they heard the sound again?

  It had been several weeks since Nikki had been among regular foot soldiers. His work for Ostarhild had kept him isolated while he roamed the battlefield sketching out maps and scribbling notations. The sixty-odd men in this trench looked damned. Many of the vacant faces were cloaked behind beards. There was no warmth in the trench; the men sat huddled, mingling the clouds of their breaths and the closeness of their fear. Some offered him drinks from bottles that were cologne vials. Nikki was horrified. They’re drinking captured perfume for the alcohol. My God, what’s happening to these men?

  Kneeling beside the soldiers, Nikki understood that these men were no longer fighting to win in Stalingrad. Here in the chill of November, their combat was not just with the Red Army but also with dread, the horror that howled when it snatched the fellow next to them without warning. Their enemies were men, yes. But every second they fought other, smaller battles: the wretched lice tormenting their skin, hunger and thirst that burned without warming, and the cold silence that threatened to close around them day and night.

  Their downcast eyes and grinding jaws revealed to Nikki that these soldiers had at last glimpsed their fate: cannons, rifles, and grenades could no longer win their freedom from Stalingrad. Stalingrad was a filthy, decrepit tomb, without remorse, pity, or relief. The city was no longer a battlefield; it was an affliction. The last weapon against it was hope.

  Slipping through the patches of lifting hands, Nikki heard the whispers. “Get him,” they pleaded, “get that Red son of a bitch.”

  “Look at him, boys. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “He was sent here by the generals.”

  “A sniper fighter. He’ll get the bastards.”

  “They haven’t forgotten us, lads.”

  That’s why Thorvald was brought here, Nikki realized. The generals saw this, the erosion of hope among the men while the Russians built a stinking hero for themselves out of the Siberian Hare.

  Nikki made an oath. We’ll get Zaitsev.

  He anointed his promise with the misery of these men. He pledged to remember forever the dried rivulets of blood hidden beneath the seven blankets in the street, and in the trench the sickening waft of cologne.

  * * * *

  NIKKI FOUND THORVALD BESIDE THE CORPSES. THE Silent nurse, no longer his guide, walked off without a glance.

  Nikki told the colonel what he had discovered. He described the layout of the positions in the trench: a dozen men and one machine gun per unit, one unit each behind the five rail cars, with fifty meters between units. The men had heard rattling sounds in the rubble. When any of them had looked up, he’d been struck down instantly by a bullet.

  Thorvald listened and nodded.

  When Nikki finished, the colonel said, “The cans are on strings. The snipers are pulling them.”

  He spoke as if he had devised the scheme himself. Even though Nikki had figured it out, too, Thorvald possessed a peculiar, poised manner of pronouncing facts, which Nikki found reassuring.

  “The first bullet was fired at unit two,” Nikki said, looking at the covered bodies to drive his memory. “The second was at unit five. The last three shots were at three, one, and then four. The Reds are skipping around and waiting.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “I think we should go down there in the trench and set up between two and three. That’s where I think they’ll hit next. When we hear the can rattle, we raise a fake helmet or something, draw him out and shoot him.”

  Thorvald nodded. “Simple. Direct.”

  Nikki waited.

  The colonel exhaled. “Suicide. Remember, there’s more than one Red sniper operating here. While I’m aiming at the one who shoots at the helmet, the other one has spotted me. No, we stay out of the trench.”

  Nikki was dismayed. He wanted to kill the Red sniper while surrounded by the haggard men, to show them how a German soldier can fight back. He envisioned himself and his colonel kindling a spark for them, giving the poor chaps something to cheer for.

  Thorvald was going to propose some scheme in which they did their work anonymously; they would be deadly but unseen. The men in the trench wouldn’t know. They would not clap Nikki and each other on the back, would not be watching firsthand when Nikki and Thorvald picked the lock of their cage.

  Thorvald had promised Nikki his say. Now he’d had it.

  “Follow me,” the colonel said.

  He walked away from his rifle, left leaning against the building. Nikki retrieved it, struggling to allay the aggravation in his gut at Thorvald’s brusqueness.

  “I found this position while you were in the trench,” the colonel said over his shoulder. “If the Russians are at ground level, we need to be above them.”

  He led Nikki to the rear of the building’s skeletal facade. They stepped over a window casing and skittered through trash and concrete. They climbed a metal staircase that had survived the bombings. At the top of the stairs, they made their way along the lip of what had been the third floor of the building. Ten meters in, the floor was gone, collapsed into the carnage below to leave a forty-meter-wide gaping hole. Nikki felt as if he were creeping along the rim of a volcano.

  Moving carefully, Thorvald guided Nikki to a set of scorched window frames. Nikki approached one of the openings and looked down. Below was the rail yard, the five German positions behind the rai
l mound, and the ruined cars on top. Thorvald had brought him to a position twenty meters to the right of unit two.

  Nikki estimated a distance of 350 meters beyond the unit and surveyed it with his binoculars. The Red snipers must be there, hidden in the wreckage, crawling in the trenches or snuggled into a crater. Or perhaps they’re gone. The light was dusking now. What amount of killing satisfies the Reds in a day?

  Thorvald sat below the window sill. He propped his rifle up and looked into the violet sky.

  “The sun’s behind us,” he said. He raised his chin, pointing to the right of unit two. “You watch there. I’ll stay to the left. The moment you see anything, I want to know.”

  He’s going to sit up here and wait, Nikki thought. He’s not even going to let me warn the men in the trench. I could tell them to stay down, don’t look up, we’ll get the snipers. I can tell them to put a helmet on a stick, stay down.