David Robbins - War of the Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad

Nikki laid down his rifle to stretch his back and legs. He opened his canteen; he did not swallow the first dram but rinsed the dust from his mouth. He hadn’t touched the canteen in the night. Thirst helped keep him awake on watch.

“Let me have some of that.” Private Pfizer walked up to start the new watch. “I feel like I’ve been breathing dry shit all night.”

Nikki handed him the canteen.

Fifty meters away, Lieutenant Hofstetter came out of the officers’ bunker shaking on his gray coat. He buttoned it casually while he walked to the two soldiers. Nikki and Pfizer stiffened at his approach. He waved them off with a yawn.

“Too early for that.”

“Yes, sir,” Nikki answered.

“Anything to report, Corporal?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, the Reds never leave anything quiet for long. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Hofstetter took Nikki’s binoculars, then stepped onto a dirt riser. The officer raised his head slowly above the top of the breastwork and brought the binoculars to his eyes. Keeping his head level, he slowly surveyed the ruins of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory.

“Nothing,” Hofstetter said. “Good. I think the Ivans took the night off.”

Pfizer held the canteen up to the lieutenant. “Sir, have a drink on that.”

Hofstetter lowered the binoculars. Turning broadside to the revetment, he raised the canteen and tilted his head back to take a long draught.

The lieutenant spasmed suddenly and threw the canteen into Pfizer’s face. Water erupted from the officer’s mouth, muffling a gurgled cry. His head whipped to the side; the canteen and binoculars fell from his rising hands. He tumbled.

The crack of a single, distant rifle flew past the trench. It circled over the morning like a buzzard, then was gone.

The lieutenant collapsed on Pfizer’s legs. The private’s face froze. He kicked the body off and scrambled to the opposite wall, ramming his back into the dirt.

Nikki snapped to his senses. He threw himself against the wall next to Pfizer, crouching low. He slid forward to lay his hand on the officer’s back. There was no breath.

Nikki looked at the officer’s helmet, still strapped under the chin. A red-rimmed hole gaped in front of the black eagle against a gold background, the emblem of the Third Reich. Blood leaked under the helmet to wet hair and ears, pooling on the Russian dirt. The lieutenant’s left foot shivered once, quivering in the puddle spilling from the canteen.

“Fucking snipers,” mumbled Pfizer. “We’re half a kilometer from the front line. How can they hit us here?”

Nikki recovered his binoculars and canteen. He looked down on the lieutenant. Nikki had seen tides of death in the past two months. Death was part of the Stalingrad landscape; it was melted into the broken bricks and shattered skyline. He bore it on his back now like scars from a lashing.

Nikki put a hand under the private’s arm. “Go get help moving the body.”

Pfizer scrambled to his feet. Without looking back at the corpse, he bent low and hurried up the trench to bring back the punishment detail, soldiers who’d been caught drinking, fighting, or sleeping on watch and were given the duty of collecting bodies.

Nikki moved away from Hofstetter and sat. Dawn had taken hold. Green and red recognition flares lofted into and out of the sky to mark the German positions so that the Luftwaffe could avoid bombing their own men in the morning’s opening sorties. Russian tracers flashed above, reaching for the screaming fighter planes. Flames danced in the decimated buildings while the constant flares exploded, flickered, and faded.

Waiting for Pfizer to return, Nikki composed letters in his head. He wrote a lie to his father on the family dairy farm in Westphalia. He told the old man not to worry; the war in the East was nearing an end, the Russian resistance was buckling. To his older sister, a nurse in Berlin, he wrote the truth, for he knew she was seeing the broken remains of this campaign firsthand in her beds and wards. Finally he drafted a letter to himself, a twenty-year-old corporal of the Wehrmacht dug in on the Eastern Front, crouched only meters from a fresh corpse. In his own letter he could neither lie convincingly nor tell the truth completely.

VASILY ZAITSEV PULLED THE BOLT BACK FAST. THE smoking casing made no sound when it landed on the dirt beside him.

At his elbow, big Viktor Medvedev bore down through his telescopic sight. The first shot had been Zaitsev’s; if a second target appeared above the German trench, Viktor would take it.

Zaitsev counted slowly under his breath to sixty. In one minute, whether or not Viktor pulled his trigger, they would move. That was the sniper’s first rule of survival: pull the trigger, then pull out. Every shot can betray your position to eyes you cannot see but which are watching everywhere on the battlefield. Never stay in one shooting cell so long that it becomes your grave.

Zaitsev was sure his bullet had hit. The canteen was the first thing he’d seen, a round shape bobbing above the trench. He’d almost fired then: at a distance of 450 meters, it was hard to tell a canteen from a man’s head. He’d increased his pressure on the trigger and waited. Five seconds later the head popped right into his crosshairs. Careless, stupid, dead German.

Viktor waited now for another target to move into his sights. On occasion a bullet blowing out the back of a man’s skull would make the soldier next to him grab his rifle or his binoculars and search vengefully for the Russian sniper who had killed his officer or his friend, who had laid the silent crosshairs on him and snuffed his life with a single bullet fired from somewhere in the ruins. The shocked survivor sometimes vomited up one brave and loyal act for the still-shaking corpse beside him. Zaitsev and Viktor hunted courage as well as stupidity.

A minute passed. Zaitsev nudged Viktor.

“Time, Bear.”

Medvedev lowered his scope. He and Zaitsev crept backward from the pile of bricks they’d hidden behind since before sunup, only fifty meters from the front line in no-man’s-land. In a shallow depression, the two pulled dirty muslin sacks from their backpacks. They slid their rifles inside the sacks and attached ropes, then slipped away into the surrounding debris without them. This close to the front line, the rifles jiggling on their backs could bring the two snipers unwanted attention.

It took them five minutes to slither thirty meters across an open boulevard, then into the shell of a building. They reeled in the sacks slowly to betray no motion in the rising light.

They sat in the building for an hour, in case a Nazi sniper had seen them enter and was waiting for them to leave. The wait would try the enemy’s patience—make him wonder if he’d missed them—as well as probe his physical ability to stay focused through his crosshairs for sixty empty minutes.

Zaitsev reached into his pack for his sniper journal. He scribbled in it, then handed the worn notebook to Medvedev.

“Sign this, Viktor.”

Medvedev read the record of the day’s kill: 17/10/42. NE quadrant, Tractor Factory sector. German bunker. Forward observer. 450 meters. Head shot.

He signed. Spotter—Medvedev, V. A. Sgt. With a quick scrawl, Viktor sketched a pair of round ears, a snarling snout, and slitted, angry eyes. Under it he wrote “the Bear.”

Master Sergeant Viktor Medvedev was a Siberian, a broad-shouldered, dark, and powerful man. His name came from medved, the word for “bear.” His partner was another Siberian, Chief Master Sergeant Vasily Zaitsev. Zaitsev had the round, flat face of a Mongol. Smaller than Viktor, he was wiry, yellow-haired, and quick, a scrambler. His name sprang from zayats, “hare.”