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

Zaitsev watched Tania bring herself to a climax. In a climbing quiver, she reached up with her free hand and pulled him down to kiss his face in the rhythms of her body. She pushed her stomach higher, pressing her thighs together over their hands. Within moments, her back flexed into an arch until she lay back with a heaving chest.

She opened her eyes. In her stillness, he felt the attention his own body clamored for now.

“Vasha,” she whispered, “go with me tomorrow.”

He looked down her length. Her knees were up. The smoothness of her legs ached inside him, pushing to come out.

“That’s the way of the taiga,” he whispered. He moved above her, sliding his knees between hers.

“The animals mate.” He lowered himself. “Then they hunt.”

MAMAYEV KURGAN’S SCARS SHOWED UNDER THE MORNING light. The snow, which had fallen until dawn, did not hide the slashes of trenches or fill the craters that gave its eastern slope the look of a moonscape. The frost glistened diamond flashes in Zaitsev’s scope while his crosshairs glided over sector six.

“Look at the top of the hill,” Tania said. “There’s no snow on it. I hear it’s because the ground stays so warm up there from all the shelling.”

Mamayev Kurgan commanded a view of the city and the Volga. Three months earlier, in August, Red soldiers standing atop the water towers on the hill’s crest first saw the dust of the German army’s advance tanks speeding over the steppe. This morning, Zaitsev knew, Nazi spotters were in command of the summit. The two armies had traded the hill several times, never keeping it for long, always attracting the worst the enemy had to dish out in order to regain the crest. The hill had been peppered with artillery shells so often and with such ferocity that the ground of Mamayev Kurgan carried within it an extra, pregnant heat.

Zaitsev and Tania hunkered down in a trench on the western edge of no-man’s-land. Before them was an impossible maze of broken machinery, abandoned guns, and pitted earth. Bodies lay under the hummocks of small snowdrifts.

Zaitsev pulled the periscope from his backpack to scan deeper into the rising field in front of them. He thought, I’ve got to make something happen. He knew the hunting would be slow on Mamayev Kurgan. The fighting had been so intense, so nonstop that anyone left alive here probably knew how to stay that way. He didn’t want to spend days with Tania helping her get her first kill as sector leader.

For a silent hour he peered through the periscope at the German breastworks. Tania crawled fifty meters away to look from a different angle and to avoid being conspicuous. The shadows shortened with the sun rising at their backs. The reflections from the glistening snow dulled. Twice, Zaitsev saw what might have been sniper movement. A wisp of cigarette smoke disappeared quickly; it might have been snow drifting on the wind. Moments after, near the same spot, he thought he glimpsed a helmet bobbing once, then twice, above the trench. This, too, vanished before he could focus on it.

Zaitsev was acquainted with waiting. But something about Chernova drove him at a faster clip. Her eager energy distracted him from his discipline, though she made no overt demands or even showed any hints of impatience with him. She has a heat, he thought, like a stove or the top of Mamayev Kurgan. Things boil up around her.

He set down the periscope and lit a cigarette, breaking a major rule of sniper engagement. He felt aggravated, restless.

Well, he thought, there’s something I’ve been wanting to try for a while. Why not this morning?

He shouldered his rifle and crawled to where Tania squatted below her periscope. She did not look away from the eyepiece when he approached.

“You’re smoking,” she said.

“Stay here. I’m going to get Danilov.”

Tania’s head snapped around. “What? Why do that? He’s no good up here. Leave him alone.”

“I have a plan. Stay here.” Zaitsev raised a finger at her. “And don’t shoot a fucking thing. Understand?”

He wagged his finger at her hard to make his point and turned to steal back to the Lazur.

“SET IT UP RIGHT HERE.”

Zaitsev stacked more bricks on the two piles he’d built above the trench. He stepped out of the way for Danilov to place the loudspeaker behind the brick mound on the left. The commissar let the bell of the speaker stick out a few centimeters to the right and pointed it up the hill toward the German lines.

Danilov unrolled the coiled cord between the microphone and the speaker. He sat on the trench floor with an effort and clicked the trigger on the microphone twice. The speaker blared to loud, tinny life.

“Wait.” Zaitsev held up his hand. “Wait for my signal, as we discussed.”

Zaitsev crawled on all fours to Tania. She stared at him, the rifle and periscope across her lap.

“So?” she asked.

Zaitsev made a quick study of her face. Her checks were flushed with the chill. A ring from the periscope showed around her right eye. Her lips held no smile but were left sour and pouting, the remnants of her one-word question to him: so?

He paused, appreciating her effect on him, her combination of beauty and will. He’d left her for ninety minutes on his trek back to the Lazur for Danilov. She’d had all that time to do nothing but stare up the slope. The stove, he thought, has warmed while I was gone.

He whispered. “Just do what I tell you, partisan.” He glanced back at Danilov. “Our little commissar is really quite good at his job, you know. And his job is agitating. In a minute, he’s going to get on his bullhorn and read some very nasty leaflets in German his brother politrooks have prepared. I suspect Danilov’s German is not so good, but it’s probably good enough to make every Nazi within earshot angry as hornets. Maybe just with his pronunciation, who can tell?”

Zaitsev grinned at his own jest. The corners of Tania’s mouth lifted. A small blue wave broke in her eyes.

“My guess,” he continued, “is that we’re going to be in a shooting gallery soon after he turns it up. You go twenty meters to the left, and I’ll stay near Danilov. If there’s sniper fire, it’ll probably be in my direction. I’ll be set up for it; I’ve got a little trick I’m going to try. Anything else, machine guns probably, I think you’ll see first. Any shots you get, take them. We move one minute after the first shot, either yours or mine.”

“Vasha.” Tania held out her hand, palm up as if to accept a coin. “You always say a sniper must guard the secrecy of his position.” She pointed at Danilov to demand an explanation for the commissar and his loudspeaker.

“Exactly.” Zaitsev grinned. “And that’s why today we try the unexpected.” He reached into her lap for her periscope. He laid it across her open hand, dropping his smile with the scope. “You wanted a hunt. Let’s hunt.”

He crawled away to set up his subterfuge, the stuffed cotton dummy he’d carried from the Lazur. He propped the dummy up behind the second, right-hand pile of bricks, moving it forward and to the left just far enough so that its helmet would be visible only in a roughly twenty-degree span to the southwest. Finally, he stuck a pipe behind the dummy’s back to hold it in place.

Zaitsev had not been a frequent user of the dummies. No one in the hares was. The opposite was their specialty, as Tania had correctly cited: the hares strove to be invisible. A dummy was designed to draw attention to itself, a feint. The dummies were better for Viktor’s line of work; the bears’ style was a more confrontational one. He’d actually heard of Viktor’s boys leaping out of their shooting cells during combat and charging. Not the way snipers should work, Zaitsev thought, but he would never tell Viktor Medvedev how to hunt or what to teach. But charging and shouting were not for Zaitsev’s little, lithe assassins. Still, the dummies were always available. Their production had become an underground cottage industry for the thousand or so native Stalingrad women left in the city. Zaitsev held a mental picture of them sitting in a circle beneath a lantern in a covered shell hole or a basement, stitching dummies out of old blankets, stuffing them with mattress filling, giving the dummies names. This was how these old women fought, with needle and thread. Zaitsev was glad now to use one of their creations. He named it Pyotr and patted it on the shoulder.