War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (21 page)

She adjusted the distance in her scope by adding the required one-eighth for downward shooting. She checked the wind; it was at her back, shielded by the building. The air was cold and would stay that way until April. She was ready now for the order, her first order as a sniper.

The three sat for two hours tracking the Nazis through their scopes. At intervals they took turns stretching, away from the windows. Tania’s legs and hands ached with the tense inaction. Her vision frosted from keeping one eye closed and the other squinting. Her cheek and fingers grew stiff against the gun’s metal.

The sun climbed, and Tania’s patience chafed. How long do we have to wait? Sokolov must be in position by now. From where we sit, Shaikin, Slepkinian, and I can take out three Nazi machine gun positions in ten seconds. Wasn’t that the idea, to help secure this corridor between the plants? Why are we waiting?

Shaikin rolled back from the window onto his back. The little man leaped with amazing agility to his feet. Tania looked away from her scope. Her ears picked up what he must have heard. Footsteps coming up the stairwell!

She reached into her coat for a grenade and rolled onto her belly. Slepkinian did the same. Shaikin laid his back against the wall beside the doorway. He held his open palm to them for silence. A knife appeared in one hand, a pistol in the other.

The footfalls were careless and loud, scuffing on the gritty steps. The sounds stopped in the hall just beyond the door.

Shaikin looked to Tania. She nodded back.

Shaikin flashed into the hallway, his pistol up.

Without a word or a glance back, he straightened and lowered the pistol to his side. He took two steps backward. Tania tightened her grip on the grenade. She glanced quickly over at the Cow. No surrender, she thought, clenching her teeth. I don’t care what Shaikin is doing.

Shaikin backed into the room. Tania pulled the pin on her grenade and brought her arm back to let it fly. From the hall, she heard a whisper.

“Tania? Tania, are you in here?”

Fedya walked into the room, his hands still up, palms facing outward where he’d flung them when surprised by Shaikin’s pistol. Behind him was the giant Griasev.

Shaikin smiled at Tania and Slepkinian.

“We should have known by the noise they were making,” he said quietly. “Bears.”

Tania slipped the pin back into the grenade. “What are you doing here?” she whispered to Fedya. She slid on her stomach back to the window.

“Medvedev sent us. He came up to the floor below you this morning and saw how good your vantage point was. We were in a building three blocks down where nothing was going on.”

Griasev wagged his head. “Not a damn thing.”

“So have you got plenty of Germans for us?” Fedya grinned.

“Take those windows there,” Tania answered, pointing.

“And be quiet,” added Slepkinian.

Tania was impressed with the Cow. She’d looked ready to fight it out, ready to die moments before.

Fedya and Griasev crawled to their places. Fedya set himself into shooting position, knees up. He wrapped the rifle strap around his wrist and elbow. He set a bundled pair of gloves on the sill and laid his barrel on them, careful to keep the muzzle back out of sight from below. He gazed through his scope to take in the German activity across the street. Tania watched him adjust his scope for distance. One-eighth, she thought, certain that he knew.

“What do you think, Tania?” Fedya asked. “Three twenty-five?”

The giant Griasev answered for her. “Three fifty.”

“Three twenty-five,” said Tania.

Fedya looked away from his sight for a moment. He caught Tania looking.

“Yes,” he whispered, “lots of Germans.”

Tania frowned. Fedya shrugged and tilted his head to look innocent, blameless for his sudden appearance here. He returned his attention to the Nazis.

Another hour passed in nippy stillness among the five snipers. Tania continued to curse Zaitsev under her breath for holding up the order to shoot. She followed the two dozen Nazis through her scope, noting how they grew more careless as their movements increased. They were digging new trenches, adding height to old ones and filling sandbags. Some even walked in the open, lugging ammunition boxes four hundred meters away.

They think they’re unseen and clever, Tania thought. They think they’re the ones with a surprise for us. But from this height, the five of us could easily wipe those sticks out. With a signal; that’s all it would take. Where is it?

At that moment, a column of German infantry burst from an alley into the street, only two hundred meters away. Tania raised her head from her scope. There looked to be about twenty in the line jogging in formation directly below.

Tania’s ears were clawed by the pounding of the Nazis’ boots on the pavement. Her hands tightened on the rifle. The bitter taste of bile rose in her throat. She recalled the sight of her grandparents’ bodies in the city square. The leaning shadow of Lenin. The footfalls of Nazis stepping in unison on the bricks. Arms restraining her, shrieks, her own voice and blood. But right now she was the one with a rifle in her hands, she was the one with
them
in
her
sights. She clenched her jaw, fleering back her lips, baring her teeth. The moments ticked; Tania felt as if she were swelling to a point where she could not contain herself and would burst.

She brought her eye down to the scope and took aim at the soldier running at the head of the squad. The black crosshairs bobbed from her pounding pulse, but the Nazis were so close below that it made little difference. She followed the one soldier running past in the street below, now less than one hundred meters away.

“Fire!” she screamed, surprised at the abruptness of her voice. Past thinking, as if she had kicked open a gate and now must go through it, she squeezed her trigger. She held tight through the jolt of the shot. The gray-green uniform jogging at the front of the line of soldiers crumpled in her scope.

The Nazis froze. Their heads jerked up at the report roaring above them.

Tania flung back the bolt. The Cow fired. A soldier in the rear of the line clutched his chest and fell.

In an instant, the room was engulfed in the sound of all five sniper rifles opening up. Those soldiers in the front and back of the line were dropped first, then the ones in the middle. The dark bodies piled up beneath the hail of bullets. Tania concentrated on the front of the line, knocking down men stumbling over corpses.

In less than fifteen seconds, it ended. Blue rifle smoke clouded the ceiling and slipped out the windows into the shattered morning. Shell casings littered the floor. Tania and her team sat hunched over their rifles. She surveyed the street through her scope, her heart pounding in her ears. She counted the victims in carnage below, stabbing each magnified body with her reticle. Most of the dead lay in a line, killed where they’d stood in the first few moments. Behind some of the bodies, smears of blood stained the street, marking the short trail of their last effort in life, crawling toward cover.

Tania’s abdomen jittered. The scope danced in her hands. She called out, “Seventeen?”

Shaikin answered, breathless. “Seventeen.”

Tania looked behind the buildings to the Nazi trenches they’d watched since dawn. These Germans had stopped their work to burrow behind their revetments and spin their machine guns back and forth to find the source of the gunfire. We’re too far away, thought Tania, pulling back from the window. They didn’t see us. Good. We’ll attend to them later, and with a bonus of seventeen broken sticks. We got them all.

Tania turned. The other snipers had lowered their rifles. Shaikin and Griasev shook hands. Slepkinian looked left and right, beaming. Only Fedya seemed displeased. He slid bullets into his magazine and shook his head.

Griasev jiggled a meaty, happy fist at Tania.

“That was some ambush,” he said, and exhaled. He clapped his great hands, rubbing them together as if eager to begin a meal.

Tania laid down her rifle and crawled from the window. Shaikin did the same. Slepkinian, Griasev, and Fedya continued to watch the German positions. The Armenian girl whistled at the mounds of dead in the street.

Well away from the windows, Shaikin walked up to Tania. “What do you think?” he asked.

“I think we put them in our books. Three each. And give the extra two to Fedya and the Cow.”

“Then we wait for orders, I guess.”

Tania walked to the doorway to sit on the stairs and collect the thoughts ricocheting in her head. She needed to grab them and cool the frenzy inside her. We’ve been taught to act with initiative, she told herself. To seize opportunities for targets, to make things happen. To wait, wait as long as we have to, then act. That’s what we did here. We waited long enough. All morning. The sticks are the enemy. That’s seventeen of them dead. That’s revenge. What more can Zaitsev want?

Tania looked at her three comrades scanning through their scopes. The light was high in the northeast now, casting shadows behind them on the filthy floor.

Shadows. The light was in their faces.

Tania’s ears pricked up. She heard a low hiss slither in through the windows. With her legs locked, her mind racing, the sound swelled into a whooshing whistle.

No, she thought. No!

The wall in front of her blew apart. Before her senses could leap, a ball of flame and a powerful black gust smashed her backwards. Bricks spewed on all sides, riding the shock wave of the explosion. Tania was hurled against the wall and collapsed to the floor. A sickening nausea spun inside her. She was deafened, numbed by the blow.

When she opened her eyes, the room was shrouded in thick whorls of smoke. Through the heart of the haze Tania saw the huge hole in the wall. The light streaming in gave the room a swirling glow.

Beside her lay Shaikin, his chin badly gashed and bleeding. He staggered to his feet and braced his hands against the wall as if climbing it. Blood was quickly covering the front of his coat.

“Up!” he screamed at Tania. “Up! Get out!”

Shaikin pulled her to her feet with a grunt. She stood and her knees buckled. Shaikin pushed her against the wall and held her there for a moment until her legs stiffened enough to support her.

Shaikin, his front stained in a crimson bib, gripped Tania’s shoulders to push her to the doorway.

“No,” she murmured, turning back to the room. “Wait.”

Shaikin yelled in her ear, “They’re dead! Dead, Tania! Go!”

He spun her around by the sleeves. She heard his shouts through the havoc. She saw the doorway and lurched toward it, dragging her feet through the rubble.

* * * *

ZAITSEV PUSHED BACK THE BLANKET AND STEPPED
gently into the hares’ quarters.

She sat in a corner, where she had been alone for three hours. Shaikin, stumbling from blood loss, had been left with a nurse who’d spotted them retreating along the Volga.

Zaitsev crouched beside her. He leaned onto the toes of his boots, pulling his heels off the floor.

“What happened?” His voice was kinder than his face.

Tania fought back tears. She had not yet cried and did not want to do so in front of Zaitsev.

In an even voice, looking at his boots, she told him of the morning. She described the activity in the trenches behind the buildings, how easy the Germans would have been to pick off, how she and the others had watched patiently for hours. Then the patrol had surprised them, running in from nowhere. She’d reacted quickly, perhaps too quickly.

Zaitsev raised his head at this. Tania looked into his flat face. His eyes throbbed.