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

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.

“What do you mean, you reacted too quickly?”

Tania felt a twinge of alarm flash across her shoulders.

“I—” She stopped.

Zaitsev’s gaze narrowed. His jaw worked behind drawn lips.

“I fired first. I gave the order,” she admitted.

Zaitsev’s hand lashed across Tania’s face, knocking her onto her side.

He stood from his crouch. “Get up!”

Tania rose. Her face stung, but she did not rub it. She backed against the wall and hung her arms at her sides.

“Comrade,” she began.

“Be quiet.”

Zaitsev stepped closer, his face only a few centimeters away. She felt heat move into the cheek he’d struck.

He shouted in her face. “What are you going to say to me, partisan? Tell me! Tell me you’re sorry you disobeyed a direct order. All right, Comrade Chernova. You’re forgiven. Tell me you’re sorry you jeopardized a vital mission. Again, Comrade Chernova, you’re forgiven. The mission continued anyway.”

He caged his voice behind clenched teeth.

“Now tell me how sorry you are that your actions killed Slepkinian, Griasev, and Michailov. You alone are responsible for their deaths. No one else.”

Tania swallowed hard. She felt immersed in dizzying, rocking waves of dread, as though she’d again been flung into the Volga.

“You didn’t get them all, Private. One of them crawled away to a mortar crew with the coordinates to your position.”

He balled his fist, “Your fucking position! You disobeyed my orders, you gave away your position and traded the lives of three of my snipers for seventeen infantrymen! Each of those snipers was worth a hundred Nazis. And you traded them for seventeen!”

Zaitsev pulled his face back, breathing hard through his nose. His wide-set eyes gouged into hers. She felt his pupils bearing down like the dark barrels of twin sniper rifles. Tania’s mind was blank, producing no thoughts of her own. Everything she heard or felt, all her senses, were in Zaitsev’s furious hands. Only a pulse of remorse cut to her surface to mingle with the mean flush in her cheek. All else waited.