‘He won’t, he’s not stupid, he knows I’d see him first silhouetted against the sky.’
‘That’s what you call instinct?’
‘Antonov has instinct. He was a hunter. I have aptitude.’
Aptitude, substitute for talent. Squinting through the sights of a Karabiner 98K on the college rifle range because he knew he could never excel at sport. Muscular co-ordination, that was what he had lacked but when it came to punching bullseyes with bullets he knew no equal and when he became a crack shot he had as many girls flirting with him as any lithe-limbed athlete, one girl in particular, Elzbeth, who had blonde hair like spun glass. He kept a photograph of her in his wallet, posing with him in Berlin when he won the Cadet Marksman of the Year award, he with his black hair glossy in the flashlights smiling fiercely over the rim of the enormous cup. Elzbeth said his face was sensitive. Some qualification for a sniper!
Lanz drew on his cigarette, cupped in his hand convict fashion. ‘Instinct versus aptitude … Which will win?’
‘You’d better pray for aptitude. If I lose, you lose and there’s no place in the Third Reich for losers.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Lanz said. ‘I’m a survivor. And if you want to survive take a few tips from me; that’s why we’re partners. Remember?’
‘I remember,’ Meister said.
‘So make your move when we launch the next attack on Mamaev Hill.’ They had lost count of how many times the hill commanding Stalingrad had changed hands. At the moment it was shared, a pyramid of rubble, exploded shells and corpses, some not quite dead. ‘You’ll have good cover. Smoke, shell-bursts. Tanks – T-34s or Panthers.’
Which, Meister thought, is exactly what Antonov will be anticipating. I might not know the arts of survival in battle but in this lone game I am Lanz’s master.
‘You don’t agree?’ Lanz asked.
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘I didn’t ask for this job.’
‘I couldn’t have done it without you. Survived this.’ Meister gestured at the desolation that had been a city.
‘When you’ve been running from the cops all your life you know a trick or two.’
‘Did you have any trouble getting into the Army? You know, with your record …’
‘I’m not a Jew, I’m not a gypsy. It was easy.’
‘But why’ Meister asked curiously, ‘did you want to fight?’
‘Who said I did? The Kripo had other plans for me if I didn’t.’ Lanz ground out his cigarette end and rubbed his bald patch with his hand leaving behind a grey smudge. ‘And you? Weren’t you too young to be conscripted?’
Meister who was now eighteen said: ‘I volunteered.’
A shelf of trophies, a head full of golden words. For the Fatherland. For the Führer. For Elzbeth.
‘Are you scared of dying?’ Lanz asked.
‘Aren’t we all?’
‘Some people beckon death. They call them heroes. Others dispatch people to their deaths. They call them politicians. But you haven’t answered my question.’
A Stuka dropped out of the sky, bent wings predatory, its pilot looking for Russians burrowing in the ruins, or ships crossing the Volga. An anti-aircraft gun opened up on the other side of the river.
‘I don’t want to die,’ Meister said.
‘Then you must kill Antonov.’
‘Of course.’ He saw Antonov with a ploughshare, its blades turning furrows of wet black earth.
A scout car stopped beside the stricken engine and a young officer with bloodshot eyes climbed out. ‘Are you Meister?’
Meister said he was.
‘The general wants to see you.’
‘The general?’
‘General Friedrich von Paulus.’ The officer looked as incredulous as Meister felt.
***
Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army that was laying siege to Stalingrad, sat at a trestle table beneath a naked light bulb in a command post, a cellar to the west of the city, poring over two maps. He didn’t look up when Meister clattered down the stone steps.
The larger map embraced the southern front. Meister could see the arrow-heads of Army Group A piercing the Caucasus, probing for its oil; above them the arrows of Army Group B trying to cut the Russians’ artery, the Volga, and amputate the great thumb of land that linked the Soviet Union with Turkey and Iran.
But the arrows lost direction at Stalingrad, the once prosperous city of half a million inhabitants. Stalingrad was the smaller map and, standing to attention opposite Paulus, Meister was able to view the plan of battle from the Soviet positions on the east bank of the Volga.
The plight of the Russians became more apparent in the cellar than it did above ground. Stalingrad was on the west bank and the Soviet forces there were encircled and divided. They were ferociously defending the industrial north and their slender waterside footholds, but nine-tenths of the city was in German hands.
At last the general leaned back in his chair and looked at Meister. Paulus had a long handsome face and big ears and his dark hair had been pressed close to his scalp by the peaked cap lying on the table. His uniform was loose on his body but he had presence. He was smoking a cigarette and there was a mound of crushed butts on a saucer.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re our latest hero.’ He appraised Meister as though looking for a hidden feature. ‘Well, we could do with one. Stand at ease, man.’ He picked up a copy of Signal. ‘Have you seen this?’ handing Meister the forces’ magazine.
‘No, Herr General.’ Meister found it difficult to believe that he was alone in a cellar with a general. He riffled the pages of the magazine until he saw Elzbeth and himself. It was the same photograph that he carried in his wallet.
‘Keep it,’ Paulus said. ‘Read it later. Don’t worry, it’s very flattering. I understand from Berlin that most of the newspapers have picked up the story. You, Meister, are just the tonic the German people need. They’ve been reading too much lately about “heavy fighting”. They know by now what that means – a setback. And do you know what that makes you?’
‘No, Herr General.’
A shell exploded nearby. The cellar trembled, the lightbulb swung.
‘A diversionary tactic.’ Paulus pulled at one of his big ears and lit another cigarette. ‘A sideshow. But at the moment the German people don’t know about your co-star.’
‘Antonov?’ Meister’s throat tickled; it was a sniper’s nightmare to cough or sneeze as, target in the sights, he caressed the trigger of his rifle.
‘So far this rivalry – this feud within a battle – has been for local consumption. But not when you kill him.’
Meister cleared his throat but the tickle remained.
‘Then,’ Paulus said, ‘the whole Fatherland will know about Karl Meister’s greatest exploit. It will be symbolic, the victory of National Socialist over Bolshevism.’
The irritation scratched at Meister’s throat. Any minute now he would be racked with coughs.
Paulus unbuttoned the top pocket of his tunic. ‘I have a message for you. It’s from the Führer.’ Paulus read from a folded sheet of paper. ‘I have heard about the exploits of Karl Meister and I am profoundly moved by both his dedication and his expertise. I am led to understand that the Bolsheviks, having forcibly been made aware of Meister’s accomplishments, have produced a competitor. I confidently await your communiqué to the effect that Meister has disposed of him.’
Meister said: ‘Antonov is very good.’ He tried unsuccessfully to dislodge the irritation in his throat with one rasping cough.
‘But not as good as you?’
‘I’m not sure. He comes from the country, I come from a city, Hamburg. Maybe I have the edge, city sharpness … But he has instinct, a hunter’s instinct.’
Paulus said: ‘You are better. The Führer knows this,’ in a tone that was difficult to identify.
‘With respect, General Paulus,’ Meister said, ‘I think we are equal. I think he and I know that.’ He coughed ag
ain.
‘Know? You have some sort of communication?’
‘Respect,’ Meister said.
‘How many Russians have you killed?’
Meister who knew Paulus knew said: ‘Twenty-three. According to the Soviet propaganda Antonov has killed twenty-three Germans.’
Paulus said: ‘Do you want to kill him?’ and Meister, still trying to blunt the prickles in his throat, said: ‘Of course, because if I don’t he will kill me.’
‘Tell me, Meister, what makes you so different? What makes a sniper? A good eye, a steady hand … thousands of men have these qualifications.’
‘Anticipation, Herr General.’ Meister wasn’t sure. A flash of sunlight on metal, a fall of earth, a crack of a breaking twig … such things helped but there was more, much more. You had to know your adversary.
‘And Antonov has this same quality?’
‘Without a doubt. That’s what makes him so good.’
He saw Antonov and himself as skeletons stripped of predictability. Anticipating anticipation.
He began to cough. The sharp coughs sounded theatrical but he couldn’t control them. He heard Paulus say: ‘I hope you don’t cough like that when you’ve got Antonov in your sights. Are you sick?’ when he had finished.
‘Just nerves,’ Meister said.
Losing interest in the cough, Paulus, leaning forward, said: ‘So, what are your impressions of the battle, young man?’
Handling his words with care, Meister told Paulus that he hadn’t expected the fighting to be so prolonged, so concentrated.
Paulus, speaking so softly that Meister could barely hear him, said: ‘Nor did I.’ He stared at the arrows on the maps. ‘Do you have any theories about the name of this Godforsaken place?’
‘Stalingrad? I’ve heard that Stalin is determined not to lose the city named after him.’
‘Stalin was here in 1918,’ Paulus said. ‘During the Civil War when it was called Tsaritsyn. The Bolsheviks sent the White Guards packing just about now, October. Stalin took a lot of the credit for it.’ Paulus leaned back from his maps. ‘Have you heard anyone suggest that the Führer is determined to capture Stalingrad because of its name?’
‘No, Herr General,’ Meister lied. He had but he didn’t believe it.
Paulus asked: ‘Have you ever considered the possibility of defeat, Meister?’
‘Never.’
‘Good.’ With one finger Paulus deployed his troops on the smaller of the two maps. ‘We didn’t expect the Russians to fight so fanatically.’ He seemed to be thinking aloud. When he looked up his face was drained by his thoughts. He waved one hand. ‘Very well, Meister, you may go. Good luck.’
‘One question, Herr General?’
Paulus inclined his head.
‘Wouldn’t it be better if the people back home knew about Antonov now? It would be a better story, the rivalry between the two of us.’
‘They will,’ Paulus said.
‘Why not now?’
‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ Paulus said. ‘In case Antonov kills you first.’
Meister began to cough again.
CHAPTER THREE
At dawn on the following day Meister went looking for Antonov.
During the night, frost had crusted the mud, and rimed the ruins so that, with mist rising from the Volga, they had an air of permanency about them, relics from some medieval havoc. Among the relics soldiers roused themselves to continue the business of killing, moving lethargically like a yawning new day-shift. It was a time for snipers.
Lanz walked ahead of Meister, rifle in one hand, sketch map in the other, as they left the remains of the Central railway station where they had spent the night after the interview with Paulus. The prolonged meeting had made it unnecessary for Meister to even consider Lanz’s advice to stalk Antonov during the assault on Mamaev Hill: the attack had taken place and for the time being it was in German hands.
Lanz’s map supposedly indicated safe streets but in Stalingrad in October, 1942, there were no such thoroughfares: even now survivors of Rodimtsev’s tall guardsmen and Batyuk’s root-chewing Mongols lurked among the relics.
They turned into a street that had been lined with wooden houses. Although they had been destroyed in August when 600 German bombers had attacked the city killing, so it was said, more than 30,000 civilians, you could still smell fire. Corpses lying among the charred timber were crystallised with frost.
Lanz, who was slightly bow-legged, paused beneath a leafless plane tree and said: ‘What’s it like to have a personal minesweeper?’
‘What’s it like to have a personal marksman?’
But of the two of them Lanz was the true protector: Lanz took the broad view of battle, Meister viewed it through his sights. Meister thought that Lanz, peering from beneath his steel helmet, looked like a tortoise.
‘Time for breakfast?’ Lanz asked.
‘When we get to the square,’ mildly surprised to hear himself, a soldier as raw as a grazed knuckle, giving orders to a corporal.
The bullet smacked into the flaking trunk of the tree above Meister’s head. He and Lanz hit the ground.
After a few seconds Lanz said: ‘Antonov?’
‘Antonov wouldn’t have missed.’
Holding his rifle, a Karabiner 98K fitted with a ZF 41 telescopic sight, Meister edged behind the bole of the tree to wait for the second shot.
The marksman, amateurish or, perhaps, wounded, was firing from the wreckage of a wooden church across the street. The fallen dome lay in the nave, a giant mushroom.
Meister, peering through his sights, looked for the sniper’s cover. If I were him … the altar just visible past the dome. He steadied the rifle, disciplined his breathing, took first pressure on the trigger.
River-smelling mist drifted along the street but it was thinning.
The second shot spat frozen mud into Lanz’s face. The marksman, whose fur hat had risen in Meister’s sights, reared and fell behind the altar.
‘Twenty-four,’ Lanz said.
They ate breakfast in a cellar in Ninth of January Square where in September Sergeant Pavlov and sixty men barricaded in a tall house had held up the German tanks for a week.
They ate bread and cheese and drank ersatz coffee handed over reluctantly by a group of soldiers when Lanz showed them a chit signed by the commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion, 194th Infantry Regiment, to which Meister was attached.
The infantrymen looked very young and they were trying to look tough; instead they looked bewildered and Meister felt much older and decided that it was his singleness of purpose, his detachment from the overall battle, that made this so.
One of them, eighteen or so with smooth cheeks and soft stubble on his chin, said: ‘So you’re Meister. What makes you tick?’ his accent Bavarian, and another, leaner faced, with a northern intonation: ‘They say you’ve killed 23 Ivans. True, or is it propaganda?’
Lanz answered him. ‘Correction. Twenty-four. He just killed one round the corner,’ making it sound as though Meister had won a game of skat.
‘I don’t know what makes me tick,’ Meister said to the Bavarian.
‘Do you enjoy killing Russians?’
‘I do my job.’
‘What sort of answer is that?’
‘Do you enjoy what you’re doing?’
‘Are you crazy?’ the northerner asked. ‘Before I came to Russia I’d never even heard of Stalingrad. It’s like fighting on the moon.’
Meister drank some bitter coffee. His mother had made beautiful coffee and in the mornings its breakfast smell had reached his bedroom and when he had opened his window he had smelled pastries from the elegant patisserie next door, a refreshing change from the smell of perfume from his father’s factory that permeated the elegant house in Hamburg.
‘What’s it like being a hero?’ the Bavarian asked.
‘Great,’ Lanz answered.
‘I suppose you’ll get an Iron Cross if you kill Antonov,’ the B
avarian said ignoring Lanz. ‘And a commission and a reception in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin.’
If kill him,’ Meister said. ‘But in any case I don’t want any of those things,’ and Lanz said: ‘How do you know about the Adlon?’
‘I’ve been around,’ the Bavarian said. He produced a looted bottle of vodka from his tunic and poured some down his throat. ‘Great stuff. Better than schnapps.’ He choked and turned away.
‘Come on,’ Lanz said to Meister, ‘move yourself – you’ve got an appointment with Comrade Antonov.’
‘Look out for mines,’ the northerner warned them. ‘We’ve been using dogs to explode them. The lieutenant lost his Dobermann that way. Where are you going anyway?’
‘Mamaev Hill,’ Meister told him.
‘Shit. Are you sure it’s ours? It could have changed hands again – the Russians shipped a lot of troops across the river in the mist.’
‘Then Antonov will be early for his appointment,’ Lanz said.
***
By 10 am the frost had melted and the mist had lifted and galleons of white cloud sailed serenely in the autumn-blue sky above Mamaev Hill which was still in German hands.
From a shell-hole on the hill, once a Tartar burial ground, more recently a picnic area, now a burial ground again, Meister could see the industrial north of Stalingrad and, to the south, the commercial and residential quarter. And he could make out the shape of the city, a knotted rope, twenty or more miles long, braiding this, the west bank of the Volga. It was rumoured that the German High Command hadn’t anticipated such an elastic sprawl; nor, it was said, had they envisaged such a breadth of water, splintered with islands and creeks.
Through his field-glasses he could see the Russian heavy artillery and the eight and twelve-barrelled Katyusha launchers spiking the fields and scrub pine on the far bank. He scanned the river, clear today of timber and bodies because, although they had used flares, the German gunners hadn’t been able to see the Russian relief ships in the mist-choked night.
Where was Antonov?
Meister swung the field-glasses to the north where only factory chimneys remained intact, fingers prodding the sky. He wouldn’t be there: snipers don’t prosper in hand-to-hand fighting.
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