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

“No sense stirring up a hornet’s nest if we can get Sokolov into place quietly,” Zaitsev said. “We’ll hunt later.”

Before dawn Tania was dispatched into a five-story building with the lanky Georgian farmer, Shaikin, and the chubby woman, Slepkinian. They climbed to the top floor. Zaitsev assured them that this side of the street had been swept clean and was firmly in Russian hands. Wary little Shaikin told Tania he’d seen too many unlucky instances where the front line had changed unexpectedly.

“It moves like a snake,” he said of the imaginary line between armies. Grenades in hand, they tiptoed up the stairwell. Tania was sorry Kostikev was not along. But Shaikin, built like a white whip, looked as though he could handle himself. She could not even guess what good the Armenian would be. For two days, Tania had been calling her “the Cow” behind her back.

The three slipped into a room on the western corner of the fifth floor, where they could see both up and across the avenue. Now, piercing the red shadows of dawn with her 4X scope, Tania looked over the broken facades to the German trenches beyond.

She sat as she had the afternoon before in the shooting gallery, at the base of a decimated window. She rested the barrel of her sniper rifle on the lip of a protruding brick, well back and hidden from view. Shaikin and the Cow sat crouched to her right, also eyeing down their scopes from behind cover.

She watched Germans scurry between trenches, following their movements three hundred meters away with her pointed-post reticle fixed on their hearts. A dozen times she imagined herself pulling the trigger. Her vision sharpened with the rising light, and she recalled Zaitsev’s words on marksmanship: think it through three times; set it up twice; fire once.

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.