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

Thorvald spoke again. “He’s right, you know.”

Nikki gave no response.

“The harvest in Germany this year was awful. Bad year on the farms. Lots of people are starving.”

“Pay no attention to it, sir.”

“Of course. It’s just… do they do this all the time?”

“All the time, sir.”

“Does it work? Does it bother you?”

Nikki eyed Thorvald. He asks a lot of questions: Were you scared? How did it feel? Does it bother you? He’s a colonel, he’s a soldier. Hasn’t he heard propaganda before?

“Yes, sir. It does work sometimes. And no, it doesn’t bother me anymore. I don’t listen to it.”

Thorvald tilted his head. He looked into the sky filled with the rattling voice from below.

“It’s good stuff,” he said. “Current. They’re good at this, the Russians. I guess they practice on their own people, hmmm?”

The sense of humor again. Nikki smiled at the colonel’s eyes, still huge even when crinkled above a grin. Let’s move on, he thought. Nothing doing here.

Below, a machine gun chattered. Nikki and Thorvald clambered to the lip of the trench. Both men trained their binoculars down the slope. One hundred fifty meters to their left was the machine gun position, sunk behind a row of sandbags. The gun crew had closed in on a spot near the base of the hill. Through the binoculars, Nikki barely made out two small piles of bricks being chewed at by the machine gunner.

Under the rasping of the gun, the loudspeaker fell silent.

Suddenly the weapon quit firing. Another machine gun far to the right of the bricks opened up.

After a few seconds, this gun, too, was silenced. Thorvald breathed under his binoculars. “Snipers.”

Nikki bore down on the brick piles. With the bullet dust settled, he saw the small arc of a metal bell, the loudspeaker. Behind one of the brick piles was the outline of a form. A man in a helmet? Hard to tell. Must be four hundred meters away, maybe farther.

“Colonel…”

“My rifle,” Thorvald said beneath his binoculars.

He wants his rifle. For a shot at this distance, downhill. Now I’ll get to see him work and we’ll know what we’ve got here in this soft white sharpshooter from the Berlin opera.

Nikki laid the sniper rifle in the snow beside the colonel. Mortar shells whisked high overhead. A second later, colonnades of dirt and smoke engulfed the loudspeaker. The explosions marched up the hill as the mortars on top of Mamayev Kurgan slammed rounds onto the Russian trench.

When the shelling stopped, Thorvald took up his rifle. He spoke in a cool voice.

“This man with the microphone and the bad German. He’ll try to retrieve his loudspeaker. It’s very important to him.”

The colonel worked only his jaw when he spoke. The rifle, the sight, did not move.

“His sniper friends are too far away to tell him to leave it alone. He’ll reach for it as soon as he shakes the dirt off.”

Thorvald watched. Nikki waited, measuring the moments in breaths and heartbeats. Without warning, without comment, Thorvald fired. The report punched Nikki in the side of the head.

“Did you get him?”

Thorvald answered only with a flip of the bolt. A smoking casing landed on the trench bank beside Nikki’s arm.

Nikki gathered his binoculars to track the colonel’s work. Quickly, he acquired the brick pile. The bell of the loudspeaker was still there. The colonel must have got him, Nikki thought.

He looked past the bricks and saw the tiny shape of the helmeted head again. He’s still standing. How?

Thorvald fired again. Nikki’s shoulders twitched at the crack of the rifle. The helmet flew off behind the target’s head. Before Nikki could ease the tension in his neck, Thorvald’s bolt flew open and another smoking cartridge landed on the mound beside him. The colonel fired again. The head in Nikki’s binoculars shook violently. Immediately, it righted itself. The head took two more rounds from Thorvald’s flying hands as the German sharpshooter fired faster than Nikki could believe. Thorvald hesitated, another bullet already loaded in the chamber. Nikki saw the head disappear. Thorvald laid down his rifle.

How could he fire so fast? How could he strike something so small as a head so far below, four hundred meters away? Is he that good? And why didn’t the head go down, explode, die?

Nikki gawked at the colonel. Thorvald returned the look for a moment with his twin lakes of eyes, then slid down the trench.

“Come down here, Corporal. They’ll be the ones with the next shot.”

Nikki squirmed backward and landed on the trench floor. He opened his mouth to speak. Too many thoughts jammed in to seek expression all at once.

“It was a dummy, Nikki. A ruse. It was put there by those snipers to draw us out.”

It worked. He fired at it. But how could a real sniper even raise his head when the man can shoot like that? Oh, my God.

Nikki took a deep breath. He arranged his juggling thoughts. He looked at the rifle at Thorvald’s feet.

“But why shoot a dummy? What good did it do?”

Thorvald took a piece of bread from his pack. He pulled it in two and handed half to Nikki.

“I told you, Corporal, we’re going to behave like wolves.” He chewed. “We’re going to announce ourselves to this Zaitsev with little stunts like this. We’ll be very, very dangerous, even a little bit rabid. We’re going to shoot everything that moves for a while and even, as you saw, a few things that don’t. He’ll hear about this little… exhibition of my abilities. He’ll know something is different out here, someone new is operating for the Germans. Then we’ll become his challenge, his monster. We’ll be all he thinks about. Goodness, he’ll say to himself, is there some sniper on the other side better than me? A better sniper? Impossible! He’s going to worry about me, obsess about me. Then he’s going to come looking for me. He’ll ask for advice about me, try to figure me out, lose sleep over me. We’ll draw him out, Nikki, like pus out of a wound. He’s going to hunt me single-mindedly. And that will handcuff him to me.”

Nikki watched the colonel talk and chew. He couldn’t tell him that the Reds already knew about him, that even now Zaitsev may be hunting him. He had to keep Thorvald safe until he could maneuver him into position to kill the Hare. But he had to do it without revealing his own cowardice, his babbling betrayal to the gold-toothed face and the blade at his throat the night before.

Thorvald took the bread back from Nikki and put it away in the pack. He looked up, his eyebrows raised. He nodded.

“We’ll make the Hare come to us, Nikki. Then we can kill him anytime we want.”

NIKOLAY KULIKOV IS BECOMING A MASTER, ZAITSEV THOUGHT.

He looked away from the eyepiece of the periscope to the side of Kulikov’s head. He’s really quite cunning. I’m going to make him a lecturer in my next class of hares.

Zaitsev whispered to him. “Ready?”

The little sniper stared down his scope. The strap of his Moisin-Nagant was wound tightly about his wrist to lock his hand in a sure grip behind the trigger. The battered wooden stock was pressed snugly against his shoulder. The rifle barrel rested on a piece of cloth in the rust of a huge steel girder.

Kulikov nodded his head in a tiny stab forward.

Zaitsev pointed at Zviad Baugderis, Kulikov’s Georgian partner in sector two. Baugderis gave two sharp tugs on a string.

Zaitsev turned back to the periscope. It was his turn to spot while Kulikov shot. Two hundred fifty meters away, five bullet-riddled rail cars rested on tracks atop a meter-high embankment. He quelled his breath to still the magnified image.

Zaitsev bore down to pick movement out of the maze of rails, bricks, and snowy earth. He caught a flicker of flesh. He hissed to Kulikov.