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

He squeezed Zaitsev’s hand again and spoke.

“Nurse.”

His burbling voice was more sorrowful for Zaitsev than the bandaged throat and faded face.

Shaikin’s mouth twisted. “Dead,” he said. He brought his hand up to his neck to point at the bullet entry point where blood was now seeping through the bandage. “Nurse, here.”

Zaitsev recalled what Tania had told him that morning. Two officers and a private, shot through the heart. Then the nurses and Shaikin, pierced through the neck like gaffed fish. Morozov, killed by a bullet through his telescopic sight. Like Baugderis.

Thorvald’s stench again. He’s shooting everything in sight, even medical officers and nurses. And he’s doing it with a flourish, an unmistakable style, so I’ll be sure to recognize his tracks.

Four days ago he displayed his abilities on the dummy Pyotr on the eastern slope of Mamayev Kurgan. The next morning, he shot Baugderis and Kulikov. Then the Headmaster moved south and waited. What was he doing? Why the three-day gap?

He was looking. He was searching for the perfect blind, a shooting cell into which he could disappear and kill anything Russian moving near him. And he found it. He can approach it invisibly and escape immediately. I know him. There, in his little fortress, he’s curled up like a serpent, bringing down five medical personnel in the past two days and this morning the two snipers who confronted him, Morozov and Shaikin.

Yes. He’s settled in. He wants this over with. He’s making it clear; he wants to go home. So he’s engraved an invitation in lead and copper and flesh and blood and sent it to me.

Come, the Headmaster has written. Come, Chief Master Sergeant Vasily Gregorievich Zaitsev, to the same spot where your friends met me today. Ask little, dying Shaikin. He’ll gurgle out the address for you.

Come, Hare.

Thank you, Headmaster. I accept.

THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED MORE QUICKLY THAN THE light. Zaitsev hunched his stiff shoulders. A cold ache ran down his neck to his lower back. For two hours, without break, he sat staring into his periscope.

The contours of the ruins and rubble dimmed through the eyepiece while the curtain of dusk lowered. He was in the identical spot that Shaikin had struggled to describe for him, where Shaikin had taken his bullet. Behind Zaitsev was a black patch in the dirt like a hunter’s blaze on the trench floor, where Morozov had fallen. Zaitsev surveyed one more time the bank of apartment buildings southwest along Solechnaya Street. He leveled his gaze and looked to his right to take in the 250 meters of open ground in Ninth of January Square, with its spilled fountains, broken benches, and uprooted shrubs and trees. The park had become a perplexity of trenches, destroyed vehicles, and craters. The square was bordered on his left by three blocks of Solechnaya Street. At the left-hand corner of the park, across the street, was Pavlov’s House. Behind the square, running along its northwest boundary, opposite where he sat, were shops and office buildings interrupted by alleys and avenues. This, Zaitsev judged, had been the heart of Stalingrad before the war.

Finally, he lowered the periscope with hands numb and weary. He’d accomplished what he’d come to do: memorize the details of the front line from this vantage point. If anything changed over the next several days, any rock moved or brick stacked, he would know.

He pulled off his white mittens to blow into his hands. He cracked his knuckles and stretched his palms to animate his grip. From his pack, he pulled a pad and pencil to draw hurried sketches in the dying light.

Zaitsev stretched his legs, which had tightened from sitting for so long in the biting air. Beneath his feet was the stained ground where Morozov’s blood had pooled and soaked down. Zaitsev slid a few meters to the side. It was not proper to linger on this spot where one friend had splashed his life into the earth and another had been mortally wounded. It seemed somehow a sacrilege for him to sit here, as if on graves. Spirits were here, where a man had died. He thought how his old grandfather would have lectured him for thinking this way; Grandmother Dunia, shaking her birch stick, would have told him to respect those spirits and listen to them, they are of the dead and know things we do not.

He put away his pad and pencil. I remember the details well enough, he considered. Besides, that isn’t the type of mistake I can expect from Thorvald. The Headmaster will make a far bolder error than just moving a brick or lighting a cigarette. And when he does, the powers hovering above this blood will help me find him, to set loose his ghost to haunt wherever it is he lies last.

For the first time since he’d learned of the Nazi’s presence in Stalingrad, Zaitsev felt his forest instincts open up. The whispering voices of his father and grandfather and of the ancestors who’d won their lives in the taiga had been silent until he’d come to sit in this place, which he knew Thorvald was watching. The voices had been waiting for clues, familiarities, keys to unlock his deeper knowledge. Thorvald was a prey he’d not hunted before, and the voices had kept their silence.

But now, with Thorvald finally within range, with the evidence of Morozov’s death and Shaikin’s dying fresh in the winter-hard dirt near him, Zaitsev’s intuitions came alive. Thorvald was a man, certainly, and the Hare had hunted hundreds of them by now. But the Headmaster possessed powers of no man he’d ever faced. This Nazi could shoot marvelously. He could carve a face with bullets in a stuffed dummy in seconds, firing his single weapon as if he were two men. His abilities with distance must be uncanny. He’d killed both Morozov and Baugderis, putting bullets through their telescopic sights while Kulikov and Shaikin, two of the most experienced hares, had watched from beside the victims, then were themselves hit. He knows the battlefield. He’s been traced to Mamayev Kurgan, then to the Red October, and now here to this park in the city center.

Thorvald is bold. He crawled into Kulikov’s trench to take his rifle. He’s twisted, perhaps even rabid. He shoots anything, wasting bullets on dummies and nurses. He’s cruel. He’s smart. And like any other man of flesh and blood, he’s surely scared to be in Stalingrad.

The Headmaster is focused, with only one task: to catch me. He’s like a mad timber wolf that no longer eats or drinks but only kills. Everything the beast does is directed toward that lone goal. That’s a weakness. It can betray him.

Zaitsev stood slowly to look over the square one last time for the evening. The light had decayed, and now the shadows seeped into the ground. It was time to leave. Zaitsev shouldered his sniper rifle, then bent to pick up the periscope. On the trench floor at his hand, somehow darker than the falling night, was the blood mark of Morozov.

He said to the blood, “I’ll be back in the morning.”

TWO HOURS LATER, ZAITSEV WALKED INTO THE SNIPERS’ bunker. Kulikov stood.

“Vasha.”

“Nikolay!” Zaitsev hugged his friend. He kissed him on each cheek, then held him at arms’ length. “You’re back. How are you? How’s the head?”

Kulikov tilted his brow to let Zaitsev examine the bandage wrapped above his ears.

Zaitsev poked his finger tenderly over where he knew the stitches were. “Well,” the Hare said with a smile, “it’s still attached. That’s better than some.”

Kulikov’s grin faded. In the moment of jocularity, Zaitsev had forgotten Baugderis. He thought now of the smashed face and of Morozov and Shaikin. And others.

“I’m well,” Kulikov said. “They shook me out of bed this afternoon. I heard what happened to Ilya and Morozov.”