War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (34 page)

“Vasha, let’s go. We’re in somebody’s crosshairs. Somebody who’s very damn good.”

Zaitsev looked up at that. He licked his lips. His mouth had gone dry.

* * * *

FIFTEEN

NIKKI ARRIVED IN THE ANTEROOM TO OSTARHILD’S OF
FICES at dawn. The colonel walked out lazily just after nine o’clock. “There’s no hurry,” he told Nikki. “The sun doesn’t shift to our backs until well after noon. Have some Dutch coffee.”

He led the colonel first to the spotter’s hill, 102.8. From there they could view the entire battlefield: the factories to the north, downtown to the south and the river islands.

All morning Nikki carried the colonel’s rifle and pack, which was stuffed with food. He didn’t mind; Thorvald shared his stores liberally, proclaiming he wouldn’t be in Stalingrad long enough to eat half of what he’d brought.

After they’d roamed for an hour up and down a trench network below the crest of Mamayev Kurgan, Thorvald stopped and gazed down the slope. Nikki pulled up beside him. A Russian loudspeaker on the hillside far below them had cranked up, prattling in an irritating, tinny treble. The narrator’s German was so riddled with accent that the words were almost unrecognizable.

“Can you make out what he’s saying?” the colonel asked.

“Barely.” Nikki grimaced.

“Oooo.” Thorvald shook his head. “That’s bad German.”

The speaker seemed unaware of his shortcoming. He shouted with conviction into his microphone. The awful metallic noise slicing up and down the hill would likely induce a headache long before the words could inflame any Germanic passion.

Nikki had begun to appreciate Colonel Thorvald. The man possessed a sense of humor, a lost thing in Stalingrad. He was clean, with no lice on him yet. He was generous with the cheeses and breads he’d brought from Berlin. Nikki liked his talkativeness, his confidence. He had not insisted that Nikki bring along his rifle. Though Nikki had yet to see him shoot, he suspected that Thorvald was what he said he was: the best.

Nikki hunched in the trench next to the colonel, admiring the man’s white parka and pants. The outfit seemed to suck down into the snow on the trench floor. He must be nearly invisible from a distance, Nikki thought. He looked down at his own gray-green coat and filthy gray pantaloons.

Nikki had listened to the Russian agitators before, at least once a week during the heavy house-to-house fighting of September and October. He and his mates had laughed at the lectures then. In those days, the German army had been powerful, secure in its belief that the Reds stood no chance of holding the city. They’re just squeaking like mice in a trap, the boys all had said.

Now everything was different. Now the message was not to be laughed at. The best he could do was ignore it even while the words drilled into his ears from the amplifier below.

The German soldier has been lied to, the loudspeaker blared. Russia is peaceful; come over to us and eat well. Consider the terrible harvest in your homeland this year, consider the hunger of your children and parents. Nikki tried to tune out the words, to hear only the scratchy warble and buzz of the shouting voice.

“He should turn it down,” Thorvald snickered. “It’s up way too loud.”

Nikki closed his eyes. This is old news, this is miserable propaganda. The colonel wants to wait here and listen to this shit, fine, let him, so he can go back to Berlin and cackle about it there with his students and opera friends.

Thorvald spoke again. “He’s right, you know.”

Nikki gave no response.

“The harvest in Germany this year was awful. Bad year on the farms. Lots of people are starving.”

“Pay no attention to it, sir.”

“Of course. It’s just ... do they do this all the time?”

“All the time, sir.”

“Does it work? Does it bother you?”

Nikki eyed Thorvald. He asks a lot of questions: Were you scared? How did it feel? Does it bother you? He’s a colonel, he’s a soldier. Hasn’t he heard propaganda before?

“Yes, sir. It does work sometimes. And no, it doesn’t bother me anymore. I don’t listen to it.”

Thorvald tilted his head. He looked into the sky filled with the rattling voice from below.

“It’s good stuff,” he said. “Current. They’re good at this, the Russians. I guess they practice on their own people, hmmm?”

The sense of humor again. Nikki smiled at the colonel’s eyes, still huge even when crinkled above a grin. Let’s move on, he thought. Nothing doing here.

Below, a machine gun chattered. Nikki and Thorvald clambered to the lip of the trench. Both men trained their binoculars down the slope. One hundred fifty meters to their left was the machine gun position, sunk behind a row of sandbags. The gun crew had closed in on a spot near the base of the hill. Through the binoculars, Nikki barely made out two small piles of bricks being chewed at by the machine gunner.

Under the rasping of the gun, the loudspeaker fell silent.

Suddenly the weapon quit firing. Another machine gun far to the right of the bricks opened up.

After a few seconds, this gun, too, was silenced. Thorvald breathed under his binoculars. “Snipers.”

Nikki bore down on the brick piles. With the bullet dust settled, he saw the small arc of a metal bell, the loudspeaker. Behind one of the brick piles was the outline of a form. A man in a helmet? Hard to tell. Must be four hundred meters away, maybe farther.

“Colonel ...”

“My rifle,” Thorvald said beneath his binoculars.

He wants his rifle. For a shot at this distance, downhill. Now I’ll get to see him work and we’ll know what we’ve got here in this soft white sharpshooter from the Berlin opera.

Nikki laid the sniper rifle in the snow beside the colonel. Mortar shells whisked high overhead. A second later, colonnades of dirt and smoke engulfed the loudspeaker. The explosions marched up the hill as the mortars on top of Mamayev Kurgan slammed rounds onto the Russian trench.

When the shelling stopped, Thorvald took up his rifle. He spoke in a cool voice.

“This man with the microphone and the bad German. He’ll try to retrieve his loudspeaker. It’s very important to him.”

The colonel worked only his jaw when he spoke. The rifle, the sight, did not move.

“His sniper friends are too far away to tell him to leave it alone. He’ll reach for it as soon as he shakes the dirt off.”

Thorvald watched. Nikki waited, measuring the moments in breaths and heartbeats. Without warning, without comment, Thorvald fired. The report punched Nikki in the side of the head.

“Did you get him?”

Thorvald answered only with a flip of the bolt. A smoking casing landed on the trench bank beside Nikki’s arm.

Nikki gathered his binoculars to track the colonel’s work. Quickly, he acquired the brick pile. The bell of the loudspeaker was still there. The colonel must have got him, Nikki thought.

He looked past the bricks and saw the tiny shape of the helmeted head again. He’s still standing. How?

Thorvald fired again. Nikki’s shoulders twitched at the crack of the rifle. The helmet flew off behind the target’s head. Before Nikki could ease the tension in his neck, Thorvald’s bolt flew open and another smoking cartridge landed on the mound beside him. The colonel fired again. The head in Nikki’s binoculars shook violently. Immediately, it righted itself. The head took two more rounds from Thorvald’s flying hands as the German sharpshooter fired faster than Nikki could believe. Thorvald hesitated, another bullet already loaded in the chamber. Nikki saw the head disappear. Thorvald laid down his rifle.

How could he fire so fast? How could he strike something so small as a head so far below, four hundred meters away? Is he that good? And why didn’t the head go down, explode, die?

Nikki gawked at the colonel. Thorvald returned the look for a moment with his twin lakes of eyes, then slid down the trench.

“Come down here, Corporal. They’ll be the ones with the next shot.”

Nikki squirmed backward and landed on the trench floor. He opened his mouth to speak. Too many thoughts jammed in to seek expression all at once.

“It was a dummy, Nikki. A ruse. It was put there by those snipers to draw us out.”

It worked. He fired at it. But how could a real sniper even raise his head when the man can shoot like that? Oh, my God.

Nikki took a deep breath. He arranged his juggling thoughts. He looked at the rifle at Thorvald’s feet.

“But why shoot a dummy? What good did it do?”

Thorvald took a piece of bread from his pack. He pulled it in two and handed half to Nikki.

“I told you, Corporal, we’re going to behave like wolves.” He chewed. “We’re going to announce ourselves to this Zaitsev with little stunts like this. We’ll be very, very dangerous, even a little bit rabid. We’re going to shoot everything that moves for a while and even, as you saw, a few things that don’t. He’ll hear about this little . . . exhibition of my abilities. He’ll know something is different out here, someone new is operating for the Germans. Then we’ll become his challenge, his monster. We’ll be all he thinks about. Goodness, he’ll say to himself, is there some sniper on the other side better than me? A better sniper? Impossible! He’s going to worry about me, obsess about me. Then he’s going to come looking for me. He’ll ask for advice about me, try to figure me out, lose sleep over me. We’ll draw him out, Nikki, like pus out of a wound. He’s going to hunt me single-mindedly. And that will handcuff him to me.”

Nikki watched the colonel talk and chew. He couldn’t tell him that the Reds already knew about him, that even now Zaitsev may be hunting him. He had to keep Thorvald safe until he could maneuver him into position to kill the Hare. But he had to do it without revealing his own cowardice, his babbling betrayal to the gold-toothed face and the blade at his throat the night before.

Thorvald took the bread back from Nikki and put it away in the pack. He looked up, his eyebrows raised. He nodded.

“We’ll make the Hare come to us, Nikki. Then we can kill him anytime we want.”

* * * *

SIXTEEN

NIKOLAY KULIKOV IS BECOMING A MASTER, ZAITSEV
THOUGHT.

He looked away from the eyepiece of the periscope to the side of Kulikov’s head. He’s really quite cunning. I’m going to make him a lecturer in my next class of hares.

Zaitsev whispered to him. “Ready?”

The little sniper stared down his scope. The strap of his Moisin-Nagant was wound tightly about his wrist to lock his hand in a sure grip behind the trigger. The battered wooden stock was pressed snugly against his shoulder. The rifle barrel rested on a piece of cloth in the rust of a huge steel girder.

Kulikov nodded his head in a tiny stab forward.

Zaitsev pointed at Zviad Baugderis, Kulikov’s Georgian partner in sector two. Baugderis gave two sharp tugs on a string.

Zaitsev turned back to the periscope. It was his turn to spot while Kulikov shot. Two hundred fifty meters away, five bullet-riddled rail cars rested on tracks atop a meter-high embankment. He quelled his breath to still the magnified image.

Zaitsev bore down to pick movement out of the maze of rails, bricks, and snowy earth. He caught a flicker of flesh. He hissed to Kulikov.

“There. The left car. Behind the back wheel. He’s peeking.”

Part of a German soldier’s head came visible in the periscope behind one of the large steel wheels.