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

by David Robbins

  Kulikov’s eyes grew shiny. He looked again at Baugderis. A tear dripped a glossy trail over his bloody cheek.

  “We were making a game out of it, Vasha,” he whispered. “There was no reason. We should have left last night. But we stayed. Just for the fucking kills.”

  Zaitsev nodded. He understood. This was Nikolay Kulikov crying, one of the best and cleverest hares. This was a sniper, a trained and focused assassin, in tears, lamenting the killing. Zaitsev knew what Kulikov had witnessed: he’d seen his own soul. He’d caught the stain of murder on it and recoiled in horror. This was what the charnel house had done to Kulikov and was doing to the men of both armies. It turned them first into righteous killers for their country, then into predators for sport and entertainment, or for vengeance. How many times can you pull a trigger and destroy a life before the realities switch on you, until the thing you are doing is killing your own spirit?

  Kulikov had put bullets into close to a hundred men, Zaitsev almost twice that many. Kulikov and Baugderis had turned the art and need and ugliness of killing into a game to ease the days. Zaitsev thought back to the slaughter in the Nazi officers’ bunker. That night, troubled by the senselessness of the act and its utter lack of military necessity, he’d been lucky. He, too, had felt the malady of his murders, as sharply as Kulikov felt his now. But Zaitsev had been near the flame of Tania to melt the ice in his heart, to tame his pain until he could bridle it. Now Kulikov sat in this trench staring over his bloody shoulder at the fruit of his own. sport, the death mask of Baugderis, and rued the rot of Stalingrad in his soul.

  Whose fault is it? Zaitsev wondered to Kulikov’s sobs. Isn’t this what we’re told to do, every moment? Kill the Nazis. Beat them into the ground, bite them, claw them, blow them up, stab, shoot, kill them until they are no longer on our soil. We’re in a frenzy, all of us, we’re rabid, all of us. Every word we hear and read, in In Our Country’s Defense and Red Star, kill the Germans. The politrooks, kill the Germans or die. The vodka which never seems to dry up for us, stay drunk, stay dim-witted and numb, kill the Germans. Wherever you find them, in battle, taking a piss, sleeping in their bunks, they’re never less than what they are: invading, miserable, stinking Nazis, the enemies of Communism, never forgiven, never pitied, never saved. Kill the Nazis or die.

  Zaitsev laid the rifle across the dead Georgian’s lap. He unbuttoned the coat and ran his hand to the inside pocket to pull out Zviad Baugderis’s Komsomol card.

  “Let’s go, Nikolay. Can you stand?”

  Kulikov struggled to his feet. Zaitsev steadied him. He pressed on the wounded man’s back to remind him to stay low.

  Zaitsev picked up Kulikov’s periscope. He looked around on the trench floor.

  “Where’s your rifle?”

  Kulikov looked down also. “It’s right . . . where is it?”

  The rifle was gone.

  Zaitsev felt as if he had fallen amidst the floes in the Volga. Cold needles nicked at his skin.

  He’s been here, he thought. He’s been in this trench.

  In his mind’s eye, Zaitsev saw the high black boots of the Nazi colonel walking where he now stood.

  Perhaps he left a clue? No, not him.

  He looked one last time at Baugderis. This isn’t enough? he thought. The bastard is making his own sport now, collecting trophies of his kills.

  Or no, wait. Not trophies. He knew he’d shot two snipers today, didn’t he? He had to come see if one of them was me. That’s his assignment. When he kills me, he goes home.

  He’s got my picture from In Our Country’s Defense.

  The Headmaster waited for the German attack to move past, then he came out behind it. Now he knows he missed me. And he took the Moisin-Nagant as a bonus. It’s better than his Mauser, and he knows that, too.

  Zaitsev ducked lower in the trench and pushed Kulikov ahead of him. Is Thorvald still in those buildings? Is he dug in and waiting for me to come to the rescue of one of my hares? Is this a trap? Is Nikolay a bait? Or did he leave Kulikov alive to tell me how incredible his shooting was?

  “Come on, Nikolay,” he said. “Let’s go. Quickly.”

  * * * *

  NINETEEN

  THORVALD ROLLED HIS WHITE CAMOUFLAGE SLEEVE down over his wristwatch. Nikki had been gone for close to an hour.

  He looked again out the window through the dust and smoke wheeling under the swelling sun. He lay back. His body recalled the night spent there, the tongue-and-groove flooring unyielding to his back. The boy certainly moves carefully, he thought. Four hundred meters out, four hundred back, and it takes him an hour to do it. Patience as a tool, a weapon. Nikki understands. Nikki has the stuff of a sniper. I may train him myself when we get back to Berlin.

  Thorvald wrapped his arms again around his rifle to rest them on his chest. He’d lain like this since Nikki left, like a corpse clutching a rifle instead of a lily. He raised his head to gaze down his white canvas tunic and pants to his boots. He clicked his toes together once, enjoying the slapstick of the move. Still alive, he thought. Still kicking. He touched his nose to the rifle barrel. The gun had grown metallic cold now, the warmth of the two spent bullets long drifted out of its black skin. The smell of oil and smoke, of flash and speed, trickled from the opening onto his cheek. Thorvald hugged the gun. He rubbed the bottom of his stubbled chin against the nub of the open sight at the end of the barrel. The rifle in his arms represented all that he was not. It was the missing part of him, the hardness and clarity not in his own flesh. The gun holds its spirit well, he thought. It smells of the kill, it feels of its nature: deadly, cold, hard. It is complete, resolved.

  The sounds of the German attack flitted in the window. Before he left, Nikki had said that it probably wasn’t Zaitsev lying out there in the trench. The Hare wouldn’t have made those mistakes, wouldn’t have stayed to the bitter end just for the kills. That’s beneath him, not worthy of the legend. Bad form. No, Thorvald thought, this Zaitsev is not a sportsman, no mere marksman like me. He’s a hunter. He likes his prey in the wild.

  Thorvald looked into the charred rafters. He focused on a sliver of ceiling plaster, hanging by some thin force, swinging in the moving chill. He was learning more every day about Zaitsev even as he learned about Stalingrad. The two, he thought, the man and the city, are clearly inseparable. They are exact opposites and thus perfect complements. The city is a cruel, indiscriminate battleground. It is misery incarnate, with its lice, filth, and terrible faces, death and injury infecting every shadow. Stalingrad is a fallen thing, jagged and ugly. It screeches and shakes with each thrust of pain like an old dying mule. But Zaitsev, he stays silent under the city’s screams. He is the solid, quiet ice and dicing cold of the Russian dawn. He has will. He’s not stripped naked like the city. He’s clothed in pride with his muttlike Siberian determination to endure. This sergeant with the forest in his veins, he doesn’t even know where he is. He thinks he’s still in the damned woods, somewhere in the mountains. He doesn’t realize the colors are gone. The forest has burned down, and in that blaze the first victims were preordained: honor, order, and mercy, the very traits that elevate us above Zaitsev’s precious wild beasts. As told in the great operas of Wagner, the ethics of Schopenhauer, the superman of Nietzsche, we are lifted above the animals, we are the more noble creatures. But in vicious battle, where men yearn only to kill each other, the raging heat of their hatred cremates their humanity. They become no more than savage, frightened brutes. Zaitsev hunts their animalness; he finds them by it and destroys them for it.

  Zaitsev won’t wake up, him and his one-man-one-bullet credo, his morality; he’s sleepwalking. Ridiculous, the notion of killing with honor—it’s an oxymoron. So there it is. The Hare is so different from Stalingrad that the city masks him, even protects him, because in some way, some intuitive hunter’s way of being in but not actually of the forest, the city cannot even touch him.

  No. That is not Vasily Zaitsev dead in the trench. Not yet.

  * * * *
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  NIKKI CALLED UP THE STAIRS. THORVALD HAD NOT heard him approach.

  “Colonel, I’m back. Come down.”

  Thorvald rose stiffly to his feet. His joints ached from the ninety minutes of cold and inactivity. “Well?” he asked, descending the steps. “How did we do?”

  Nikki hefted a long Russian rifle with a scope. “There were two snipers down, sir. No Zaitsev.”

  “Hmmm. Well, no surprise there. I suppose we’ll have to be good instead of lucky, eh, Nikki?”

  Thorvald pointed at the Moisin-Nagant. He’d seen plenty of them at Gnössen, had taught on them. They were good rifles, dependable in rough conditions if a little slow.

  “If there were two dead,” he asked, pointing at the Moisin-Nagant, “why only one rifle?”

  Thorvald handed his Mauser to Nikki in exchange for the Moisin-Nagant. The Russian weapon was heavier. It felt awkward, crude, like a plow horse, he thought. But plow horses, the Russians understand, don’t break down.

  “Well, Corporal,” he prodded, “where’s the other rifle?”

  “The other rifle,” Nikki said, his face distant, perhaps back in the trench seeing something again, “was no good. I left it.”

  “That’s fine. No need carrying damaged guns across that rail yard. You know, and I did mention it before you left, I thought something might be wrong with one of those Russian rifles.”

  Thorvald busied himself looking through the Moisin-Nagant’s 4X sight. He turned his profile to Nikki and swung the rifle up and down—Mark! Pull! No, no good for traps, too head-heavy.

  “What, in fact, was wrong with it, Nikki?”

  Nikki paused. Thorvald concentrated into the Russian scope and waited for an answer in the confident way a man waits for a ball to drop when he has tossed it up.

  Nikki shuffled his feet in the dirt.

  “Nobody’s that good, Colonel.”

  Without looking, Thorvald knew Nikki was staring at him. The young corporal was hooked to him now like a fish on a lure, to what he’d seen in the trench.

  Thorvald swung the Russian rifle up, then down again. Clumsy. But reliable, deadly. I can hit with this, oh, yes.

  “Indulge me, Corporal. Tell me about the other rifle.”

  “The other rifle had been shot through the scope.”

  Thorvald lowered the Moisin-Nagant. He grinned. “Really?”

  Nikki slung the Mauser’s strap over his shoulder. He reached out to take the Russian rifle from Thorvald.

  “Quite a shot, Colonel.”

  Thorvald slid on his white mittens and walked behind Nikki down the steps into the street. Soldiers scattered urgently in all directions.

  “Not really a shot,” Thorvald said into the air. “More of a calling card, actually.”

  Thorvald didn’t care where he was going; he knew Nikki would guide him well. He’d been right to choose this boy over one of Ostarhild’s snipers. The young corporal knew the battlefield. Even though Thorvald had done the actual shooting, Nikki had brought him to this morning’s targets and thrown the rock that had sealed the Red snipers’ fates. The young corporal had crawled out at his command to retrieve the Russian rifle, to ascertain if Zaitsev had been a victim, and to verify his “calling card.”

  Good, he thought. It’s all working well. Nikki needed to see what I can do.

  * * * *

  THEY TRAVELED FIVE KILOMETERS WEST TOWARD THE rear, where the rush of men and machinery slowed. The battle sounds receded, and the thumps from mortars and tanks grew muffled in the maze of streets and alleys. A motorcycle messenger shot past them toward the tumult. Even the rasping spit of the speeding bike faded quickly into the blackened stones and brick piles around them. The decimated city seemed to swallow sound, light, life.

  Thorvald stopped and sat on his pack. He called Nikki to sit also. He wanted to talk.

  Thorvald glanced at the ruins. Over their tops, the sounds and smoke of the German offensive rose like newly released spirits into the sky. The city rumbled, the two armies clawed at each other.

  “Look around, Nikki.” He swept his arm over the smorgasbord of destruction. “Look at all this. Tens of thousands of men, all headed in one direction. And you and me, we’re off on our own, just the two of us. We’re fighting a different war.”

  The pounding of mortar shells amplified his point. “We’re not using the same weapons as the rest of them. We’re not knocking everything down, trying to root out every Russian we can find. We’re working alone, on our own private seek-and-destroy mission. We’re not looking for Red divisions with bombs and tanks and ten battalions. We’re looking for just one man with these.”

  He jabbed his finger at the Russian and German sniper rifles Nikki had laid down.

  “How do we do it? How do we find one quiet man in all this noise? It’s got me confused and, I’ll be honest, a bit worried.”

  Thorvald looked at the wreckage surrounding them. Concrete ghosts, he thought, carcasses of debris everywhere you look, Zaitsev could be anywhere, in any of those windows, cellars, trenches, gullies, gorges, ruins, tunnels. And the next day, the next hour, he could be someplace else. He could even be lying dead from another soldier’s bullet or from a stray piece of shrapnel. And I’ll be handcuffed here searching for a dead man, or at best a moving, hidden target who doesn’t even know I’m looking for him.

  What am I doing? I can’t keep this up, I can’t keep following this boy around Stalingrad, shooting at whatever he points out for me. I can’t spend my every waking hour engaging Russian snipers in every quadrant of this infernal city, sending Nikki out two or three times a day to see if I’ve managed to put a hole in that bastard Zaitsev. No, this is an absurd and fatal plan. This is me, alone with a bold, bloody teenager trying to find one pinprick of a man in an endlessly hellish haystack. And Nikki wants me to engage every Red sniper we can find like a trick sharpshooter in a traveling sideshow, just to catch Zaitsev’s attention. At this rate, I’ll probably draw a bullet long before I can deliver one to the Hare.

  “Nikki,” he said at last, pleased suddenly by the feeling of being conclusive, “we don’t have time anymore to parade all over Stalingrad looking for Zaitsev. Even though we’ve just started, we have to change our plan. I wasn’t sent out here to clean the city of snipers. Just one man. That’s all we need to get us both a ride home.”

  Nikki’s head hung. He fingered bits of gravel.

  Thorvald continued. “Let’s figure out a better way to let Zaitsev know I’m here. He won’t be able to stand it. The legend, the hero, he’ll come charging right at us like a mad bull. What do you think?”

  Nikki made a fist around a stone and stared into the dirt.

  Thorvald repeated, “What do you think?”

  Nikki looked up.

  “It’s already done.”

  Thorvald laughed. What was the boy talking about? What’s done? Zaitsev couldn’t know I’m looking for him. He’s not so powerful a hunter as to be clairvoyant.

  Thorvald tossed a pebble over his right shoulder. It was a prayer for good luck learned beside the ponds of his childhood. Their waters shone behind the green estates of his kin, far away. “What? That fancy shot through the scope? I’d have to make that shot ten more times before Zaitsev would even notice. He’ll think it was an accident.”

  “Not that shot, Colonel. Zaitsev knows you’re here. He’s known for a couple of days.”

  The words pulled Thorvald upright. He touched his fingertips together.

  Nikki looked down again. He spoke into the ground.

  “I told them.”

  Thorvald blinked. “You . . . you what? You told whom?”

  “The Russians.”

  Zaitsev knows I’m here? Thorvald’s senses rang with alarms. This boy told Zaitsev I’m here? How could he have done that? How could he have spoken with Zaitsev? What is this corporal, a Red agent? A spy, a traitor? Thorvald’s thoughts raced, their brakes yanked off suddenly by Nikki’s admission. Why is he telling me this? He looked at N
ikki’s feet, the two rifles lying there, both loaded. They were the only weapons within reach except for the knife on Nikki’s hip.

  Nikki continued. “I was captured. The night after you landed. The Russians were behind our lines; they caught me while I was fixing a telephone wire. They were going to kill me. I had to tell them something or they were going to cut my throat.”

  Nikki stood. One rifle hung in each fist.

  “So I gave them you, Colonel. I didn’t think it would matter. I told them you were here to kill Zaitsev. They liked that. A duel between their supersniper and our supersniper. They let me live so that I could tell you about it. But I didn’t.”

  Thorvald glared up at the corporal. The boy’s admission was plausible. Nikki was captured; he panicked and talked, just like I would have done, he thought. But the tale didn’t allay his sudden suspicion of Nikki. This boy has known all along that Zaitsev is looking for me. He knew and didn’t tell me. He’s been manipulating me, risking my life, planning more confrontations that might have been with Zaitsev, the Red superman, without my knowing it. Well, well. Young Nikki. A killer, a liar, a traitor, and a coward.