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

The soft stomping of shelling came from the factories, their distant flashes no help to him here by the park. He rested beside the wall thirty meters from where Kulikov sat. He eased himself down, crossing his legs, and pulled off his mittens. He rolled back his white hood to remove his helmet, then unfastened the top two buttons of his coat. The wind was light, a curtain of cold. He let the chill brush over him. The calm gave the night a distilled purity, a clarity the world does not have when the wind is high. Let the night in, he thought. He breathed deeply to fill his lungs with the cold; let the night speak. The stars, the earth, the cold, even the city, let it in. Join it.

He closed his eyes and exhaled.

“Bat ya nai,” he said. God of the taiga. It was a Yakut offering to bring the hunter luck.

He chased his thoughts outward. Thorvald. I know where he is. I’ve read him. Zaitsev let his thoughts pick up speed. Thorvald. He knows me. So what do I do about it? I must be something else, not me. Not the Hare. Not what he expects.

The cold scratched at his cheeks and neck. It awakened the parts of his body where he carried the instincts and senses he trusted most, from long before—his gut, his shoulders, the back of his neck, and wrists.

Thorvald is expecting the Hare. So I must be something he does not expect. He knows I can be the night, the earth, the ruins.

I am Russian. The city is Russian. He knows all this.

A moan of artillery from the north tolled in the ground. He opened his eyes.

The city is German, too.

German.

I will be German.

He knows all my tactics, all the ones I’ve taught, the ones described in detail by Danilov. This time I’ll use one that hasn’t appeared in In Our Country’s Defense.

I’ll use a tactic the Germans themselves taught me.

Zaitsev put on his helmet and pulled up his hood. With numbed fingers, he buttoned his coat and slid into his mittens. He looked into the canopy that twinkled with stars and artillery.

“Thank you,” he said to the spirits of the night and the battle.

He walked quickly to where Kulikov waited. “Nikolay, I have an errand for you. It requires your talent for silent movement.”

Kulikov answered with a keen look, like a hound eager to track.

“Go,” Zaitsev said, thrilled to be in action after so long a time waiting, “to the eastern slope of Mamayev Kurgan. Bring me back a mortar shell.”

THORVALD DRUMMED HIS FINGERS IN THE DIRT. SIX dawns in a row, he thought, six days lying in this awful hole. And what do I have to show for my dozens of hours staring across this little park? Nothing but a rabbit who won’t come out of his hutch.

Face me, Rabbit. We’ll have a contest. Competition targets, clay disks, name it. Whoever is the better shot wins. The loser shoots himself in the head, and we’ll be done with it. But let’s do it, Rabbit. Enough of this cold crawling down the backs of our necks and dribbling down our ribs all day. Enough of sandwiches and cheeses. It’s time for a dark beer and a steak served on bone china and starched linen instead of stale food from a paper bag on a filthy floor.

Look at what you’ve done now, Rabbit. You’ve moved thirty meters to the left from where you’ve sat the last three days. You’ve carved out a notch in the top of the wall. You must have worked late last night. But just an hour after dawn I saw your ruse. A nice effort, little bunny. It almost fooled me. I believed for a short while that this was your game for today, a test for me. You wanted to know, was I keeping notes on the terrain? Did I have it memorized? Would I spot a small alteration in the contours on your side of the park? Yes, of course, Rabbit. Elementary. Among the first lessons I teach at Gnössen. You forget, I train your kind. Then I remembered, I haven’t seen your kind before. You go beyond the lessons; that is your renown. It’s why I was called from Berlin to kill you. So I began to look farther than your little notch. Could it be a fake? Something to draw my attention away from another ploy? I had the morning on my hands, why not spend it speculating, yes? And I searched. I burned up my eyes like cheap batteries, scanning every centimeter of your wall. Then five minutes ago, there it was: not quite a flash but a glimmer of light, brighter than the wall. A yellow taint, brass or gold like an old wedding band. Twenty meters to the right of the notch, you’ve dug a clever little yellow tunnel at the base of the wall. Is that a mortar shell you’ve slid into the hole? How wily of you, Rabbit. You didn’t think I’d see that, did you? Two positions: one obvious, to anchor my attention, another one hidden to kill me. Excellent. You would have passed my class at Gnössen, Rabbit. But with only a second-level grade. Were I your teacher, I would have made you shake a handful of rocks inside your tube to dull its sheen. We all make mistakes, Rabbit; don’t feel bad. It was just a tiny falter I couldn’t expect a Siberian sergeant to avoid. One can’t think of everything, can one?

What’s the time? Damn, I’ve been watching for five hours. It’s late morning. The sun is shoving high past your shoulder; it’s your advantage, and you haven’t made your move yet. You’re waiting for a mistake on my part. It won’t happen, Rabbit. I’ve caught you. Just make a move and I’ll trigger my trap. Will you take action, or is your strategy to kill me with boredom? How could this be? You’re reputed to be a superman. Are you really not a master sniper at all but simply some plucky hayseed from the Urals? Perhaps you’re too scared to act. Or worse, perhaps you’re a hoax. You don’t even exist. Oh, no, that can’t be! Zaitsev, a myth? A ruse of the Russian military press, a propaganda trick to whip up morale among the miserable? No, impossible. In fact, too possible. Think, Heinz, what evidence have you seen of a Zaitsev? None. The Reds have seen plenty of me. I’ve made shots that will leave them talking about me for months. But I haven’t seen the first round from the Rabbit. One man, one bullet? Could it be a lie, just some tinsel to cover the fact that he never shoots because he doesn’t exist? Oh, shit. Shit, is this a joke?

That does it. The next Russian I shoot, I tell Nikki and the generals that I hit the Rabbit and I’m getting on a plane to Berlin. It’ll take days before the Red newspapers come out and claim that I missed him. By then, I’ll be gone and the generals won’t bring me back.

Nikki. I’ll take him with me. A gentleman’s word is his bond. He’ll be able to tell them in Berlin how many times I’ve crawled into this evil dark nest. I’ll keep Nikki close to me, keep my power over him; he won’t lie about me. If I say I got the Rabbit between the eyes, he’ll be as eager to believe it as me. I’ll make Nikki a sergeant because their uniforms look better and I don’t want to be around a corporal at the opera. I’ll make him my driver, yes, better than a sniper, he doesn’t seem to like guns. I’ll keep him away from my students at Gnössen. No need for them to hear more than one version of my time in Stalingrad. I’m a teacher, after all. They need to look up to me.

And what if Nikki is right? What if the Russians are indeed readying a colossal counterattack somewhere? What if, while I’m lying in this hole on the edge of this giant scab that used to be a park, I’m not even facing Zaitsev but just some more junior snipers? Perhaps the real Zaitsev is ten kilometers away, preparing to take part in a bigger, more vital mission. Why would they take him out of action and assign him to find just me? Who am I to be so important to command the sole attention of the great Rabbit? It was easy to send me after him; I wasn’t doing anything important, just cooling my heels in Gnössen, in the mornings teaching boys how to shoot other boys, then knocking down traps in my free afternoons. Pull! Mark! Ah, Heinz, there is the very real possibility that Zaitsev is a hoax, a fake, just like that notch carved in the wall. But it really doesn’t matter now whether that’s Zaitsev across the park or any other Ivan. Because some Red bastard, the next one I see, is going to die. Maybe I’ll bag two this morning, one in the notch and another in the tunnel. Yes.