War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (47 page)

Konstantin Danyelovich Morozov had been one of Viktor’s bears and a friend of Zaitsev’s in the 284th, a fellow Siberian. Now he was a large corpse, shot through the cheek beneath the right eye, the back of his head split open. The bullet that killed him had bounced off his telescopic sight, smashing it.

Zaitsev stepped away as two men lifted Morozov’s stretcher onto the back of a sled. They would pull it to the caves at the water’s edge, the storage area for the dead, to await evacuation and burial once the river froze.

After the Volga turns solid, he thought, we’ll see these bodies link into a stream of sleds, like black ants teeming away from a picnic, thousands without end. Bodies going, blankets and vodka returning. But still no ammunition. No reinforcements.

That’s a sure signal that something is up. The Germans have hurled as many as ten divisions at us since August. We’ve countered with less than five divisions of reinforcements. My snipers haven’t had a full complement of bullets to work with in the entire month of November. Even Atai Chebibulin has been frustrated in his efforts to find extra ammo.

The generals and
politrooks
keep telling us to hold out. Hold out for what? We’ve been given the job of drawing as many Nazis into the city as possible and then keeping them here. We could wipe them out of Stalingrad right now with enough men and ammo on our side. The Nazis are shivering, hopeless. The force has gone out of them. They’re not soldiers any longer, just the limp, molted skins of former fighting men. But Stalin and his generals are holding back their thrust, hoarding our ammo, keeping us in check. It means they’re building up to strike back. They must be. They haven’t forgotten us.

Something is coming. And it’s coming soon.

Thorvald knows it, too. He must. He’s a colonel. He’s not like me, a dirty little sergeant getting his information through the grapevine or out of sterilized articles written by the likes of Danilov. He’s been flown in to kill me, just me. He goes home when he’s done it. He’ll want to do it soon.

Zaitsev looked across the frosty crust forming at the river’s edge. He’d seen many frozen rivers in Siberia. He knew this ice wouldn’t be thick enough for trucks and horse-drawn carts until mid-December.

And Morozov, also a Siberian; Zaitsev shook his head. Morozov would see no more rivers, nor sky nor life.

Zaitsev turned away. Another friend. Another hero carted off on a sled like baggage, one more memory to safeguard and avenge.

Morozov.

This has Thorvald’s smell. Thorvald is talking to me. He’s writing messages, drawing a map of where to meet him, scribbling in the blood of Baugderis, Kulikov, Morozov.

And Shaikin.

Ilya Shaikin had been shot through the neck while spotting for Morozov in sector fifteen on the southern rim of the city center. The sector ran along the front line below the. Lazur in the afternoon shadow of Mamayev Kurgan. In this thin slice of downtown, Red soldiers were burrowed inside several formidable and well-placed buildings. These had become impregnable strongholds, with wave after wave of Germans crashing against them only to be repulsed by withering Russian counterfire. These fortresses were so steadfastly defended that they’d become landmarks on Red Army maps. In most instances they carried their former names, such as the House of Specialists, the state bank, and the beer hall. But in a few cases the previous stature of a building had been superseded by a new identity, arising out of the remarkable adventures of its Russian defenders. Such were the L-Shaped House and the Old Mill, whose names evoked murmurs of awe for the fighting prowess of their guardians. The most famous of all the strongholds was Pavlov’s House. The badly damaged apartment building had been unofficially renamed for the indomitable Russian sergeant Jacob Pavlov, who with twenty men had occupied the ruin on Solechnaya Street on the front line since September 29. Pavlov continued to deny the Nazis access to the Volga, which was only two hundred meters behind him. He’d held so long in place that the commanders had taken to calling him “the House-owner.”

In the past three days, Zaitsev and Viktor had received reports of renewed German sniper activity south of Mamayev Kurgan, near the city center. Medical units had come under fire while evacuating the wounded in the alleys and streets in the area around Pavlov’s House. Two officers and a private had been shot through their hearts. One nurse had been killed by a bullet under her chin, another wounded by a bullet through the neck.

It made sense to Zaitsev that Thorvald would avoid the factories: the sheer numbers of dead there would obscure his handiwork. It would hide his scent, the scat of slaughter, which he trusted would draw his quarry, the Hare, to him.

That dawn, Shaikin had volunteered with Morozov to scout the reports of German snipers in sector fifteen. “You can’t be everywhere at once, Vasha,” Shaikin had said at the end of the meeting in the snipers’ bunker. “Just in case it’s our Headmaster shooting up the place. I’ll go have a talk with the wounded nurse. Then Morozov and I will take a look.

“Oh, by the way,” Shaikin said, readying to leave, lifting the blanket in the doorway, “I’m sorry about yesterday afternoon. Chekov and Tania talked me into it. She should never have been in that cellar. You were a good fellow about it.”

“Why should you be sorry, Ilyushka? Why would it matter to me if Tania was there?”

“Vasha,” his friend said with a smile, “let me use Chekov’s words, his exact words, when he told me. He said, ‘Comrade Zaitsev is a very silent sniper, you know. But he’s quite a loud loverboy.’ “

Shaikin’s last laugh was muted behind the dropping blanket.

Now Shaikin lies in a field hospital for evacuation. Tania had run to tell him about it in the afternoon. “Vasha! Morozov is dead, a bullet to the brain. Shaikin has been shot through the throat. Shaikin dragged Morozov’s body out of their trench to where an artillery spotter saw them and sent help. Morozov’s body is at the Lazur. Shaikin is in the hospital in sector thirteen in critical condition. They said he had his hand clamped over his neck, Vasha, to keep the blood in.”

* * * *

“ILYUSHKA.”

Shaikin opened his eyes, the begging eyes of a maimed animal.

Shaikin gasped, “Vashinka.” The name was almost lost in the gush of air from the wounded man’s mouth, as though he had to fully empty his lungs to push the word through the gauntlet of pain in his throat.

Zaitsev looked down on his friend. Shaikin was sunken into a stretcher propped on bricks. His neck was wrapped in clean gauze. His hand was crusted red between the fingers from his own blood.

Shaikin clenched his eyes. Inhaling, his mouth remained open in a suffering circle, a small dark well. Zaitsev was stricken by the gurgling deep in his friend’s throat.

“Don’t talk, Ilya.” He put his hand on Shaikin’s bloody fist. “Nod your head. Was it Thorvald?”

Shaikin squeezed Zaitsev’s fingers. His eyes opened. His head shuddered up and down. Yes.

“You talked to the wounded nurse? Was it him, too?”

Shaikin winced. It seemed not from pain but from a thought.

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.