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

This is it, Nikki thought, Paulus’s last-ditch thrust at the Russians burrowed in the factories. Far to his left, from the Banny Gully and the Barricades, came the pounding of artillery. Small-arms fire sizzled in the Red October corridor.

Thorvald was at his rifle, bearing down his scope.

“Start looking,” he whispered. “We can’t stay here long. Maybe our friends will take one last jingle on their cans before they’re forced to retreat. Remember, they’re at ground level.”

Nikki scanned the rubble across from unit three. The sounds of tanks and men swarmed behind him, moving to his left, advancing on the Red October and the Volga.

“It’s getting busy, Colonel,” he said, pulling his eyes away from the binoculars.

“A bit.” Thorvald looked agreeably at Nikki.

Suddenly Thorvald stiffened. His eyes grew wide, then slitted to focus over Nikki’s shoulder. “Nikki,” he said, not blinking or wavering the aim of his eyes, “find the third house in on the far side of the road. Do it.”

Nikki whirled with his binoculars up. For a moment, before searching for the shacks, he looked down into the trench to unit three. The soldiers’ normal huddle was broken. A few of them crawled away from the group on their knees, others were bent, looking to the floor of the trench. There, between the backs and shoulders of the soldiers, was a bloodied body, face up, shaking wildly.

Nikki swung the binoculars and found the houses quickly. They were simple brick shacks, part of the workers’ settlement for the Red October, gutted months ago. He counted to the third one.

As Nikki scanned, Thorvald’s voice came in his ears quietly, like a cinema narration to the magnified scene moving in front of him.

“Ten meters to the left. What’s there?”

Nikki fingered the knob on his binoculars to sharpen the focus. “A sheet of corrugated metal. A roof, I think, from one of the shacks.”

“Yes. Yes, good. All right, now move behind the roof. Find the small shack. It might be a pump house.”

“Got it. Red shutters.”

“Right. Now ten, twenty meters more, keep moving left. Is there a trench in front of that building with the… what is that?”

“It’s a banner. It’s… it’s a poster of Stalin.”

“Perfect. Is there a trench? I saw something in that area. Find a trench. Quickly, Nikki.”

Piles of bricks and stone confused the terrain in front of the row of ruined shacks. Snow blotted out most of the detail. But in a jagged line, the snow and bricks seemed to disappear. There must be a depression there, Nikki thought. A trench.

“Yes. Yes, there is.”

“Follow it. Find them. I saw a muzzle flash in that trench.”

Nikki strained his eyes. The distance was at least four hundred meters, and the area was in shadow. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Men, yes. But what would he see? A rifle barrel or a face at this distance? Impossible.

Cooling his frustration. Nikki stopped looking for objects and shapes and directed his eyes to recognize motion. In moments he glimpsed a gray lump bobbing just below the trench line. A helmet! It’s coming this way!

The Red snipers are making one last round of their lines before they retreat. They’re tugging, then watching for a shot. If a shot is there, they’ll take it and keep moving down the line. Unit five, then four, just now three, next two. Right in front of us.

“Got him!” Nikki whispered. His eyes locked on the helmet— There! Two of them! Two of them moving in the trench! Nikki talked Thorvald in, bringing him onto the targets.

He spoke quickly, concisely. He knew Thorvald was looking now through his sniper scope, his vision magnified, too, with a sharper but more limited field than Nikki’s binoculars.

“The last shack, Colonel. See it? Now down five meters. A small crater, a wagon wheel sticking out of it.”

“Yes.”

“To the left again, a pile of timbers lying under another piece of metal.”

“Yes.”

“Ten meters down. A water cistern, or a barrel.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Now straight down from the tower. There’s the poster. Five more meters left. They’re right below a pile of bricks.”

Thorvald paused. Nikki waited with him.

The colonel hissed, “Yessss.”

“You’ve got them?”

Thorvald answered in a faraway tenor. “Don’t speak.”

Nikki was shackled to the moment, sharing through the binoculars the power and killing art of the Gnössen master sniper. He shuddered with a rush of excitement he knew the colonel did not feel.

The Russian snipers stopped opposite unit two, three hundred meters away. They split up; one moved ten meters to the right in the trench. They were only slightly more than specks through the field glasses, but Nikki felt that he could see them with the clarity of God’s eye. One of the helmets dipped below the lip of the trench. The other stood firm. The standing one was the shooter; the other was the spotter. He must have ducked to lay down his rifle and take up the string and his periscope. Is this the way Thorvald is thinking? Is he following their movements like this, guessing what they’re doing, predicting what they’ll do next? Nikki could not ask, only watch.

He wanted to take his sight away from the snipers for a moment and gaze down at unit two. But he knew it would take him too long to reacquire the tiny shapes of the faraway enemy. He kept his focus on the gray dot, highlighted against the scrambled brown and white background. The other lump did not reappear to the right of it. There, Nikki thought, there’s the shooter. But is it enough of a target for Thorvald to get a clear shot? Is he high enough above the trench? Thorvald won’t waste all our effort just to bounce a bullet off the top of a helmet.

For two minutes they watched the Red snipers. The spotter stayed beneath the crest of the trench to gaze through a periscope. The shooter hunkered down, too low, waiting for the word from his spotter that a target was making itself available before he raised his eye to his gun.

Thorvald broke the silence. “They’re not going for it.”

Nikki was deflated. All this time shivering on the cold floor in this creaking building, sleeping under dead men’s shrouds, and he and the colonel were going to go away empty.

“Nikki, how far can you throw?”

Nikki knew what Thorvald wanted from him. The men in the trench weren’t rising to the Russians’ bait. They’d heard enough of the tin can. They weren’t biting, weren’t going to look this last time. There’s a German attack under way, there’s no way the Reds are crawling toward them. They know this down in the trench. They’re thinking, Fuck the Red snipers. We’ll get them in a few minutes when the attack rolls over their position. We’re not looking.

Thorvald couldn’t shoot. Not yet.

He needed a soldier to raise his head. To freeze the waiting Russian sniper in his scope, perhaps give Thorvald another muzzle flash to zero in on.

He needed a new mystery, a new rattle in the rubble.

The master sniper needed a sacrifice. Now.

Only for a moment, Nikki considered refusing. But his reluctance flew away home, over his father’s farm in Westphalia, into his sister’s arms.

I’m defenseless, he thought. What does it matter? Shit, there’s nothing left of me to defend.

Thorvald asked again. “How far can you throw?”

“Far enough.”

Nikki laid his binoculars down and stood away from the window. He selected a rounded bit of brick that fit his hand well. It’ll fly straight and far, he thought. Far enough.

Nikki readied his feet. “Now,” he whispered.

He threw the shard with all his might. The brick sailed high over the heads of the German soldiers in the trench, like a hard little angel of death. Nikki didn’t see it land, but he knew he’d thrown it far enough.