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

“Nicht schiessen, bitte,” she called to the voices.

With a clatter, a dark shape leaped out of the ground and ran to her. The soldier seized her roughly, grabbing down one of her raised arms. Tania allowed herself to be pulled and then tossed over the lip of a trench. She tumbled onto the dirt floor.

A kicking boot rolled her onto her back. A rifle barrel was thrust into her throat, pressed hard there, making her gasp.

‘Who the fuck are you?” a shadow demanded.

He was joined by two others with rifles ready. “Talk!”

Another voice said angrily, “Spreche!”

Tania kept still, moving only her lips.

“I’m Russian. The 284th. My transport was blown up. last night crossing the Volga. I floated downriver behind the lines.”

The gun pressed deeper into her throat. Hands felt along her arms and legs, frisking her for weapons.

“How do you know German?”

Tania’s voice gurgled. “I was a partisan in Byeloruss. We had to learn a little German.”

The gun eased at her throat. She took a breath and cleared her throat. “Not like you Ivan dicks who only know how to sleep on guard and throw women around.”

One of the voices laughed. The gun was taken away.

“The 284th?”

“Yes. Under Batyuk.”

A soldier leaned down. She heard sniffing.

“Damn, what is that smell?”

Tania laughed. Fedya’s armor, she thought.

“It’s shit. I’ve got it all over me. It’s a long story.”

“Don’t tell me.” The soldier reached down to help Tania off the floor of the trench.

“Sorry,” he said. “We didn’t know who you were. All I saw was someone stand up right in front of me and shout in German. I thought you were an infiltrator.”

Tania looked at the three soldiers. The hard treatment was no less than she’d expected.

“If I’d been an infiltrator, would I have called to you in Russian or German?”

Two of the three answered after a moment of considering in the dark trench. “Russian.” The third nodded.

Tania smiled at her guess. Another chance I took. I’ll hear about this one from Fedya, too.

She told the soldiers about leaving Fedya lying in the dirt twenty meters away. She called to him.

“Fedya, it’s all right. Come in. We’re back!”

He scrambled to the trench and was frisked as soon as he tumbled down.

Tania did not approach him. “Comrade Michailov,” she said.

“Comrade Chernova.” He nodded to her, then shook hands with the soldiers, smiling, thanking each of them for not shooting at them. “Good job,” he said. “Nice work. Excellent.”

Tania turned to the men. “Could you help us get some clean clothes? And a meal?”

One of the guards stepped forward. “Clean clothes will have to wait until morning. We can’t leave our posts. As for the meal…”

The soldier reached into his coat to pull out a flask of vodka. He handed it first to Fedya.

“Welcome to Stalingrad.”

“EVERYONE ON YOUR FEET, LET’S GO!”

Viktor Medvedev walked into the huge shop bay. Thirty soldiers jumped up from their seats on the scattered bins, barrels, and crates.

The high brick walls of the massive basement glowed with the salmon light of dawn. Once a machine shop for the Lazur chemical plant, the room’s heavy machinery had been evacuated across the Volga in early summer, leaving a gray expanse of bare floor. Like all the large buildings in Stalingrad, the Lazur had been reduced by the Luftwaffe’s bombings to scorched steel and cinder block until it could neither fall apart nor burn more. The Red Army had burrowed into the rubble of the Lazur and the wreckage in the rail yard surrounding the plant. The basement had survived intact beneath the mounds of collapsed brick and girders above. This morning the late October chill spilled through shattered windows high overhead. The room was quiet, its vast emptiness devouring sound.

The thirty soldiers standing before Viktor were the first sniper volunteers from the 284th. Commissar Igor Danilov had told the Hare and the Bear he wanted to limit the school’s first class to soldiers from their own division, to encourage other divisions to start sniper initiatives.

Most of the volunteers had read about the formation of the sniper unit and the exploits of Chief Master Sergeant Zaitsev in the flimsy news sheet In Our Country’s Defense, put out twice a week by the Communists to the defenders of Stalingrad.

Viktor stubbed out a cigarette and began.

“You are all here for one purpose only. You will learn to be snipers to kill Germans.”

The Bear held up a rifle with a telescopic sight. “No matter what your battle experience has been before today, fighting as a sniper will be different. You’ll need skills beyond those of an infantry soldier. You’ll need greater intelligence and discipline. You will no longer be part of a thousand-man battalion doing only what you’re told. You will be snipers, acting on your own impulse. You must think, then move, then act. If you don’t, you’ll be killed. That I guarantee you.”

Viktor stepped closer to the front row of recruits.

“This unit is the first of its kind. Until now the Russian sniper has been a brave but largely disorganized and ineffective tool. We have served well, but we can serve better. Over the next several days you will learn how to hunt down your opponent. You will kill him in his own lair with the silence and terror of distance. You will strike at him in his most vulnerable moments: while he smokes his morning cigarette, when he takes a piss, scooping his evening beans and horse meat into his mouth. You’ll kill him when he makes the smallest misstep. Fear will haunt him every moment, the fear of wearing the silent brand of our crosshairs. He won’t know when the bullet is coming for him or the man next to him. But he will know there is no safe ground for him in Russia. That is your charge.”

Viktor raised the weapon. “Your telescopic site will bring your prey close. You will stalk and watch the enemy, perhaps for hours or days at a time. You’ll see his face, see his teeth, watch his head explode.”

The Bear lowered the rifle. “This type of killing must be done with patience and without heat. This is cold death. You will know the man you’re putting a bullet into.”

Viktor sat on an empty crate. He laid the rifle across his knees as if resting an oar from rowing.

Through the shop door came Zaitsev, his footsteps clicking on the concrete. He cast his eyes over the recruits, continuing the scrutiny he’d begun outside the doorway, listening to Viktor’s opening remarks. Six of the soldiers in the room he already knew: Baugderis, Shaikin, Morozor, the giant Griasev, Kostikev, and little Kulikov. In the past few days, he’d asked each personally to join the sniper unit after seeing them in action. He’d met Baugderis, Shaikin, and Kostikev while hunting on Mamayev Kurgan, watching the three, all farm boys from Tbilisi in Georgia, calmly drop Nazis at two hundred meters using only open sights. Viktor had found Griasev, a mammoth with arms and hands like jackhammers, at the Tractor Factory, throwing grenades over fifty meters with alarming accuracy, an unheard-of feat. Kostikev was a Siberian from Zaitsev’s company in the 284th. He was as skilled with a stiletto as with a rifle and was the calmest man Zaitsev had seen in close combat. And Zaitsev had spent hours watching tiny Nikolay Kulikov at the Barricades Plant crawl a dozen times under enemy fire to bring supplies to a squad pinned down in a trench.

This first class of volunteers looked gritty and battle-hardened. Their sizes ranged from the hulking Griasev to a short and flabby Armenian woman, one of two women in the group.