War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (22 page)

“What do you mean, you reacted too quickly?”

Tania felt a twinge of alarm flash across her shoulders.

“I—” She stopped.

Zaitsev’s gaze narrowed. His jaw worked behind drawn lips.

“I fired first. I gave the order,” she admitted.

Zaitsev’s hand lashed across Tania’s face, knocking her onto her side.

He stood from his crouch. “Get up!”

Tania rose. Her face stung, but she did not rub it. She backed against the wall and hung her arms at her sides.

“Comrade,” she began.

“Be quiet.”

Zaitsev stepped closer, his face only a few centimeters away. She felt heat move into the cheek he’d struck.

He shouted in her face. “What are you going to say to me, partisan? Tell me! Tell me you’re sorry you disobeyed a direct order. All right, Comrade Chernova. You’re forgiven. Tell me you’re sorry you jeopardized a vital mission. Again, Comrade Chernova, you’re forgiven. The mission continued anyway.”

He caged his voice behind clenched teeth.

“Now tell me how sorry you are that your actions killed Slepkinian, Griasev, and Michailov. You alone are responsible for their deaths. No one else.”

Tania swallowed hard. She felt immersed in dizzying, rocking waves of dread, as though she’d again been flung into the Volga.

“You didn’t get them all, Private. One of them crawled away to a mortar crew with the coordinates to your position.”

He balled his fist, “Your fucking position! You disobeyed my orders, you gave away your position and traded the lives of three of my snipers for seventeen infantrymen! Each of those snipers was worth a hundred Nazis. And you traded them for seventeen!”

Zaitsev pulled his face back, breathing hard through his nose. His wide-set eyes gouged into hers. She felt his pupils bearing down like the dark barrels of twin sniper rifles. Tania’s mind was blank, producing no thoughts of her own. Everything she heard or felt, all her senses, were in Zaitsev’s furious hands. Only a pulse of remorse cut to her surface to mingle with the mean flush in her cheek. All else waited.

Zaitsev shook his head. “We are not here to erase your memories, partisan. I don’t know what you’ve seen or what you’ve lost, but whatever it is, your pain is not greater than Russia’s.”

He pulled himself erect. “Russia’s, damn it! Not your pain, But Russia’s! You are in the Red Army! You are no longer fighting a one-woman war! Don’t ever forget this! Don’t ever! It was your stupidity and selfishness that murdered three Russian soldiers!”

He leveled a shaking, angry finger at her. “From this moment on, you will do what you are told to the letter or I’ll have Danilov put a bullet in the back of your brain! Do you understand me?”

Zaitsev spun on his heels and stomped from the room. He yanked the blanket from its nails when he flung it aside.

Tania slid down the wall. Tears welled in her eyes. She felt them slipping over her cheeks. The tears tapped on the backs of her hands, limp in her lap.

Tania closed her eyes. She tried to listen to her own sobbing, but her ears were full of Zaitsev’s anger. He’d screamed at her. He’d struck her.

She felt exiled from her body, floating beside it as if her spirit had become so full of grief and guilt she had to leave its bounds to contain it all. She looked down on herself, slumped there against the wall. She tried to feel pity for the weeping girl. All she felt was contempt.

I killed them, she realized. I, stupid and selfish, killed them. I am responsible. I am sitting here, crying, trembling, alive. And they are not.

She thudded her head against the wall. She searched for her voice to speak to the echoes of Zaitsev’s boots disappearing down the hall, to answer the image in her mind of Fedya lying broken beneath a smoking pile of rubble, his young poet’s eyes open, his stare no longer at this world.

She held her hands in front of her, making fists and releasing them, flexing the fingers until they hurt, as if she were clawing her way out of a dungeon. Pain delivered her back inside her body.

Her cheek glowed. She whispered, “I understand.”

* * * *

TWO

THE DUEL

* * * *

ELEVEN

THE PANZER GROWLED AROUND THE CORNER, ITS IRON
hatches shut tight. Cautiously, the tank ground down the street, swinging its gray turret with a metallic whine. The crew inside looked for the Russians they knew were dug into the ruins ahead.

From behind, another panzer watched the progress of the lead tank, guarding it with a motionless cannon. Farther around the corner, out of view, an infantry unit waited to move in behind the tank cover.

A small explosion leaped from the second floor of a building at the far end of the street. A Russian 76 mm antitank gun had opened up at fifty meters and missed. The lead tank slammed into reverse and accelerated backward down the street, elevating its turret to the telltale flash of the antitank gunner’s discharge. Farther back, the idling guard tank fired an antipersonnel shell into the ruins. A squad of Nazi infantrymen jumped from their hiding places to rake the now revealed Russian position with bullets and grenades.

At this moment in the battle, the way he’d learned over the past ten days on a dozen other streets like this, Corporal Nikki Mond raised his binoculars to the rooftops and teetering facades above the clatter. There, as if preordained, he spotted the bristles of Russian sniper rifles. They appeared only for a moment, like black thorns protruding from the buildings. With the sounds of distant, single pops, they picked off the German infantry one by one.

Nikki knew these sharpshooters had lain motionless for hours, since before dawn, in the eaves of those skeletal buildings. During this first week of November, what the soldiers had taken to calling “the quiet days,” Nikki had grown aware of the increasingly deadly presence of enemy snipers. With the faltering of the Luftwaffe and the prevalence of smaller-scale battles, these silent assassins of the Red Army seemed to have crept into every crevice along the front line.

Nikki had witnessed several occasions where the action escalated from this point, each side calling in more and heavier weapons. If for some reason they did not, then the furor always settled down, with the dead left lying in full view. The wounded had to drag themselves to cover, then stay where they were until dark, unable even in their agony to cry out for help for fear that the snipers above or a creeping Ivan would finish them off. During the “quiet days,” few prisoners were being taken.

This tedious taking and giving of alleys, streets, and buildings had become for the combatants of both armies the real battle of Stalingrad. Instead of the major confrontations of September and October spent pounding against the thin Russian beachhead, all the actions mounted now were disjointed local clashes at the company level, with each side trying to improve its position meter by meter. The bitter siege had become a grim bog, allowing only slow, torturous steps.

Both armies had gone underground. Cellars, culverts, tunnels, and a seemingly endless network of shallow trenches called “rat runs,” like scratches over the city’s frozen skin, now made up the contours of the battlefield under the gathering winter sky. The foot soldiers of the Wehrmacht called it
Rattenkrieg.
War of the rats.

Nikki lowered his binoculars to scribble hurried memos in his notebook. This was his new assignment: forward observer, assigned to German intelligence. His charge was to watch frontline infantry action and report on tactics and casualty counts.

After Captain Mercker and his unit were buried in the debris, Nikki had led his nine fellow survivors to a Command forward headquarters. There he’d encountered an intense young lieutenant, Karl Ostarhild. He told Ostarhild of the disaster while the officer poured him a cup of coffee. Ostarhild rolled out a map for him to locate the blown-up building where Mercker and his company had died. Hovering over the map, Nikki pointed out what he knew about the Red positions, strong points and weaknesses. Ostarhild had been impressed not only by the breadth of Nikki’s observations and knowledge but by how hard he’d won them. The lieutenant asked Nikki to stay on under his command as an intelligence observer. Nikki accepted gladly.

Since then, he’d followed the sounds of rattling tanks and chattering automatic weapons across the city. He had not himself fired a weapon or thrown a grenade in twelve days. He did not even carry his rifle any longer.

Ostarhild was growing nervous about the information he was getting. He’d spent weeks compiling data from reconnaissance planes, visual observations, prisoner interrogations, and radio intercepts. He had no doubt that something very big was in the works on the Russian side. He didn’t know what, but the signs told him it was of titanic scale.

The day before, on November seventh, Ostarhild had taken his data plus his preliminary conclusions to brief his superiors in Golubinka, several kilometers west on the safety of the steppe. He laid out his reports of a massive buildup of men and materiel in the northern, Kletskaya region. The lieutenant presented his theory that this might be a Russian attack army, armed and mobile, primed for a counter-offensive. He gave the assembled generals details about each Red unit, where they came from, even the names of their commanders.

Ostarhild related that the Russian Sixty-second Army, under General Chuikov, had been forced by STAVKA, the Russian high command, to suffer through a severe reduction in ammunition. Where was the ammo going? That morning, which happened to be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin had made a surprisingly jubilant speech, monitored by shortwave from Moscow. Referring to the battle for Stalingrad, Stalin offered the cryptic reference that “soon there’s going to be a holiday in our street, too.”

Drawing partially on Nikki’s observations and frontline savvy, Ostarhild presented a vivid picture of the current status of the battle. The attack on Stalingrad had become a series of violent, personal battles. The Germans, in small groups, might occasionally grab a block of ruins or even reach the Volga in or around the factory district. Once they’d consolidated their gains by digging in, the units often found themselves cut off by Russians who moved back across the narrow corridors the Germans had cut. The wounded were frequently unreachable; the dead were left to stiffen in gruesome postures on the ground. The men were losing all hope of personal survival. They continued to fight, but too often their strength was the result of alcohol or contraband amphetamines. Ostarhild depicted the Nazi soldier as unshaven, weary from lack of sleep or relief, ridden with lice, fearful of spending another Russian winter in battle, and having lost all sense of the Reich’s greater purpose in bleeding for this city. Now, they fought—Ostarhild quoted the words of a battlefield reporter—”only for the ultimate obsession: to get at one another’s throats.”

The Russian position in the city was equally perilous. Along a three-mile stretch, the Reds clung desperately to their diminishing portion. In some places the riverbank was less than a hundred meters from their backs. Along with a throttled reserve of ammunition and a fantastic casualty rate, the Russians’ looming problem was that the Volga—the Red Army’s only link to its supply lines—was quickly growing unnavigable. The huge ice floes from the north that annually clogged the river had begun to tighten, but the Volga would not freeze solid enough to permit ground transport over it for another four or five weeks. Until then, the Reds’ reinforcements and supplies would be drastically reduced, if not cut off altogether.

The young lieutenant was asked by his commanding officers if this, then, was not a good time to mount one more large offensive. Ostarhild had anticipated the question: he knew the instant he heard it that he couldn’t answer honestly. A true response would not have been what the staff wanted to hear nor what they were prepared to pass on to General Paulus, the head of the Sixth Army. In his heart, Ostarhild felt the common soldiers had grown too disorganized, too cold in the shadow of their own doom to take part effectively in any more major assaults. As an intelligence officer, he’d censored hundreds of letters from the troops addressed to loved ones back home. Without exception, the letters displayed a deep brooding over their bleak prospects for returning to Germany alive. Command had responded by ordering all such letters intercepted and impounded. No sense depressing the home front with defeatist claptrap, they’d said.