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

And he’s using my tactics against me. Pretend to be a freshman. Lower your enemy’s guard. Make him careless. Irritate him. Rattle his calm, wear down his endurance. The helmet on the stick. Not a stupid ruse at all. It made me angry. He knows it. Worse, he’s lecturing me in my own tactics.

Zaitsev’s mind raced to the dozens of times he’d played these same games with other Nazi snipers. Make them angry, turn the battle into a vendetta, make it personal. He recalled a month ago, one morning near the Barricades, when he’d shot one of two German snipers who’d burrowed behind a railroad mound. After his first bullet, which he was certain had split the nose of the first sniper, he’d raised a sign over his position with the number 10 scrawled on it with a charred stick. The number signified a perfect shot in a marksmanship competition. After a few quiet minutes to let the Nazi boil over the gall of this bizarre Russian sniper, Zaitsev simply put his helmet on the stick. He marched it along the top of the breastwork and, within moments, Chekov knocked down the second German sniper. The hot fool simply couldn’t contain himself and fired on the helmet. The lesson: never let it become personal.

Tania’s right. I’m locked into a pattern. Thorvald has me confused and angry. He’s guiding me as if I were on a bridle. I’ve transformed this duel into a personal vendetta to repay him for killing my hares. He hunted them as the best way to get to me. It worked.

Before Zaitsev could respond to Tania, the bunker’s blanket was pushed aside. The brass buttons of a wool greatcoat, the ones down the chest of Captain Danilov, entered the room.

To Zaitsev, Danilov looked wrong in the snipers’ bunker, even though the commissar had been there many times before. Tonight, wrapped so tightly in his duel with the Headmaster, Zaitsev was stung by the fat man’s presence. This is a place for fighters, he thought, men and women who are strong, deadly, vital, and hard. Here is this soft little man, shorter than a hare and wider than a barrel, standing in the middle of the room where others, better than him, have stood and would not stand again. Zaitsev sensed an ugly urge to sit on Danilov or rest the lantern on him as though he were a table.

“Comrades.” Danilov greeted Zaitsev and Tania jovially. The lamp’s sallow light darkened his amiable smile.

“Comrade commissar,” Zaitsev acknowledged the politrook. He felt the interruption keenly; he wanted to continue dissecting the Headmaster with Tania for the next day’s hunt.

Danilov did not sit. Good, thought Zaitsev. When he sits, he stays.

“Chief Master Sergeant,” the commissar began, “what happened in the search for the German master sniper today?”

Zaitsev shook his head. “Nothing. But I’m sure I know where he is now. We have agreed, the Headmaster and I, that we should meet across a park downtown.”

“Excellent,” Danilov said. “I like the idea of the park. A wide-open space. Nothing between you but distance. Little to hide behind but your wits. A wonderful scene. I should like to see it.”

Zaitsev’s and Tania’s eyes ran to each other. She heard it, too! Danilov wants to come with me.

“Tomorrow,” the commissar added.

Zaitsev spoke immediately. “No, you can’t go.”

“Certainly I can.” Only Danilov’s lips moved.

Zaitsev made two fists. He shook them at the commissar.

“This is not what you think it is! This is a battle of concentration. The Headmaster and I are linked into something beyond what you can put into one of your articles. The Headmaster is not going to be patient with any mistakes. He’s a killer.”

“And so are you, Hare. You speak so well when you’re excited, did you know? I’ll be here two hours before dawn.”

Danilov turned to leave.

Zaitsev shouted, “No!”

Tania tugged on his pants leg.

“Yes,” she said.

Danilov turned to the snipers. “Private Chernova,” he said, eyes twinkling like moonlit waters, “thank you for your support. The Hare can be a stubborn man, can’t he?”

“Yes, comrade, he can be. But just before you came in, we were discussing the tactics of the Nazi sniper. He’s a most complex enemy, and I’m sure Comrade Zaitsev understands that the more help he can get in catching him, the better.”

Danilov hung in the doorway, his nose in the air. He seemed to sample the room for danger.

The commissar looked at her. Danilov wonders the same as I, Zaitsev thought. What’s Tania’s game?

Danilov turned on his heels. “In the morning, then.” He was gone with a tired sweep of the blanket.

Zaitsev waited, looking at the blanket, at the only thing in the room Danilov had touched. He felt words and impulses knocking at his brain, angry questions to throw at Tania. He sat quietly, preferring first to lie still behind the cover of silence.

“Vasha, look at me.”

He turned and blinked once, slowly. “Yes?”

She smiled. “I may have just done a very smart thing, or it may be very dumb. Can I tell you why it was smart?”

“Yes.”

“There’s something undeniable about Danilov. We both have seen it. You even went back to get him last week because of it. Remember? When you came hunting with me on Mamayev Kurgan.”

Zaitsev felt a moment building, like a swell of water. Tania was reaching out to him, and he wanted to reach back. He deeply wanted the inertia and warmth of Tania; his temper had to be dismissed into the cold and dark, out with Danilov.

Tania cocked her head. She rose to her knees and leaned her face so close that her blue eyes filled him, as if her eyes themselves were breathing onto his cheek. He blew at her like a bug to be brushed kindly away from his face. She blew back, softly, sexily, barely enough to shimmy a candle flame.

“Whenever he’s around,” she whispered, rubbing her nose against his, “things happen, don’t they? You said so yourself. So take him to visit Thorvald. And see what happens.”

AN HOUR AFTER DAWN, THE GERMANS SURGED AGAIN AT PAVLOV’S HOUSE.

Zaitsev, Kulikov, and Danilov could not see the fighting, which was two hundred meters from where they sat behind the park wall. The attack came from the south side of the building, blocking their view. Still, the sounds of artillery and automatic weapons seared the air. The smoke of guns and dust from the wounds inflicted on the walls of Pavlov’s House crept across the open ground. The thump of shells pounded in the ground beneath them, sounding down the street like someone beating dirt out of a carpet.

The attack exhausted itself by midmorning. Machine-gun fire issued again from the windows of the apartment building. Sergeant Jacob Pavlov, the Houseowner, was still at home.

Zaitsev and Kulikov kept their eyes sealed to their scopes. With the morning sun at their backs, they did not fear reflections off their sights. The Headmaster might catch a peek of us, Zaitsev thought, but he already suspects we’re here. He won’t be surprised. Also, in this battle haze, it’s unlikely he’ll see whatever we might show him well enough to shoot at it.

Danilov sat next to Kulikov. The commissar’s shoulders were hunched over another of his notebooks. Only the small of his back rested against the wall. That morning, when the commissar had met Zaitsev and Kulikov outside the snipers’ bunker in the dark cold, he had tucked under his arm the battered loudspeaker and the battery pack and microphone.

“We’ll have a little chat with the Nazi colonel this morning,” Danilov remarked in place of a greeting to the two snipers. Again, Zaitsev thought of the commissar as a barrel, rolling up to them, full nearly to bursting.

Danilov puffed up. “The Headmaster will talk back to me, and then you two can shut him up.”