War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (5 page)

“When I saw the bottomless mortar shell, I realized it would make a perfect shooting tube. It could be buried inside a trench mound or hidden among other shells, as this sniper had done. It would make him almost invisible.”

Zaitsev had focused his periscope on the shell. With his free hand, he raised his helmet on his bayonet. A flash appeared inside the shell. The helmet sprang off the bayonet, dented in the front. Zaitsev gave the sniper credit for his patience and cunning. He’d had the first shot. The next belonged to the Hare.

The following dawn Zaitsev crawled to the same spot and located the shell pile. He counted again. This time he found only twenty-two shells. The shooting tube was gone. This sniper was no freshman; he knew to shoot and move. He’d taken the open shell with him. Where? Using the periscope, Zaitsev looked in every pit in the ground, along every mound. After three exhausting hours he found the brass shell buried near the top of a trench a hundred meters east of its original site. The camouflage was sloppy; part of the tube was left sticking out of the trench. A yellow reflection glistened in the rising sun, enough for Zaitsev to zero in on.

He crawled to a new position, one where the sun was directly over his shoulder and shining into the eyes of the German. He laid his rifle between two rocks and focused his scope on the mouth of the tube. Leaving the rifle, he slithered three meters to a pile of bricks. Again he raised his helmet on the bayonet Again the Nazi stung the helmet with a bullet. Zaitsev scrambled back to his rifle. He stared down his scope into the open shell two hundred meters away. At the other end of the brass tube, the sniper leaned down just for a second to pick the spent casing from the trench floor. Still following the rules, Zaitsev thought, like all good snipers. Leave no trace behind.

Zaitsev waited for him to straighten. When he did, he split the Germans brow with his crosshairs. The bullet, Zaitsev’s lone offering in this one-on-one battle, struck between the eyes. He saw the rifle, lying ownerless now, in the gleaming shell.

“Between the eyes?” Batyuk repeated. He seemed doubtful.

“Yes, sir.”

Zaitsev held the colonel’s gaze. It had been his shot, his kill. One bullet, one Nazi. That was Zaitsev’s creed, his special gift. He did not doubt. He raised his finger. He put it between his own eyebrows. “Right here,” he said.

Batyuk returned his attention to Zaitsev’s journal. He read through the final entries, then laid the booklet on the desk.

“This morning you shot an officer near the Tractor Factory.”

Zaitsev stretched his back. He’d been sitting for almost an hour. “The Germans change shifts at dawn. The ones coming on watch often light a cigarette or do something stupid like stretch. The sleepy ones get careless.”

“What did this one do?”

“He took a drink from a canteen. His head popped up like a cork.”

Batyuk waited.

Zaitsev shrugged. “And I blew it off. Sir.”

Batyuk patted the journal. “It says here you’ve killed forty-two Germans in twelve days’ work. How many bullets have you used in those twelve days?”

“Forty-three, sir.”

Batyuk smiled. “What went wrong?”

“I was hunting some officers on Mamayev Kurgan. I crawled above them on the slope. They were bathing in a pool of rainwater in a crater. I forgot to take into account that I was firing downhill.”

“And?”

“And I was tired and did not add one eighth of the distance to the total. I undershot. The officers jumped out of the pool.”

Batyuk continued to smile. “What did you do then, Vasily?”

“I saw my mistake and I left.”

Batyuk leaned forward, his fingers steepled above his palms. “You didn’t shoot more at the officers? I assume they were visible long enough for you to get off another shot.”

“Yes, sir, I could have fired. But it’s not the good way. A sniper should not shoot after he’s revealed his position. One or two officers in return for a sniper is not a good trade.”

Batyuk stood up. He nodded in small bobs, then clapped his hands once. “Vasily, I have a job for you.”

* * * *

VIKTOR MEDVEDEV FOLDED HIS
RED STAR
NEWSPAPER IN
the middle.

“He wants you to do what?”

The two were alone in the snipers’ bunker in late afternoon.

Viktor’s custom was to prowl from sunset until noon, then rest during the day.

Zaitsev replied, “He wants me to start a sniper school.”

“You?” Viktor tossed the
Red Star
at Zaitsev’s chest.

Zaitsev crumpled a page into a ball and bounced it off his fellow Siberian’s forehead. “Batyuk says he needs heroes.”

“I’m going to be sick.” Viktor lifted his girth off the floor to pace and raise his arms in mock exasperation. “He wants heroes. What’s he got now? Sheep? Children?”

He bent to pick up the wadded news page. “Don’t do this to my paper. I read this. You may not think what’s in here matters,” he said holding up the ball, “but I do.”

The big man’s peevishness amused Zaitsev. He watched his friend uncrumple the paper and smooth it on the table. He looks like a giant woman doing her ironing, Zaitsev thought.

“You’ll need my help, of course,” Viktor said.

“Of course. There are so many things I don’t know.”

Viktor folded the wrinkled page carefully. “These damn freshmen they send us are too fast, too hot. They last about a week before they get their dicks shot off.”

“City boys,” Zaitsev agreed. “Farm boys.”

He smiled at Viktor, as good a hunter as he, better in some respects. The Bear was fearless, an excellent night stalker. He was astonishingly silent on the move—even with his bulk—and patient and clever in the hunt. He could squeeze off two shots in five seconds, accurate to 350 meters. Zaitsev needed six seconds. But give me enough time to set up a shot, he thought, and I’ll nail a head shot ten out of ten at five hundred meters in the wind. Let’s see the Bear do that.

We’ll put together a unit of snipers to do exactly what Batyuk wants. We’ll train them to make every Nazi in Stalingrad afraid for his life twenty-four hours a day, on the front line or deep in their rear. The Germans will be scared to lift their heads for fear of having them blown off. We’ll be the Red Army’s assassins. We’ll be everywhere.

He took his sniper journal from his pack. He felt the booklet’s weight, sensing its contents.

I’ll be everywhere.

* * * *

“EXCUSE ME, COMRADE. MAY I COME IN?”

Zaitsev opened his eyes and checked his watch; 4:00
A.M.
A hand pushed aside the blanket hanging in the bunker doorway. A lantern appeared, followed by a dark-eyed, jowly head. On top of the head sat a fur hat dotted with a red star medallion, the mark of a commissar.

Zaitsev arranged his senses. He stood.

“Did I wake you?” The commissar stepped into the bunker. He was short and thick. His greatcoat hung almost to the floor, to the tops of his shiny boots. The first shiny boots I’ve seen in a month, thought Zaitsev.

“Come in, comrade.”

“You are Vasily Gregorievich Zaitsev?”

The commissar did not hesitate for a response. He reached his hand out to Zaitsev. “I am Captain Igor Semyonovich Danilov, a reporter with
Red Star.
Colonel Batyuk requested I speak with you.”

Zaitsev shook the commissar’s hand. He motioned to the bare dirt floor.

Danilov sat, his back against the wall. He took a pad and pencil from his coat pocket. Zaitsev settled on his bedroll.

“Colonel Batyuk has given us both assignments. You are to begin a new sniper movement in the 284th. I have been asked by the colonel to be your political liaison. He has told me a great deal about you, Vasily Gregorievich.” The commissar made a note, then continued. “I know you are to be the leader of the new sniper school, comrade. I believe the recruiting for your school will be helped if it gets some coverage in
Red Star.”

Zaitsev shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t read it.”

Danilov reached out to touch Zaitsev on the back of the hand. Zaitsev recoiled slightly at the familiarity.

“You should. There is plenty of useful information in
Red Star.
Tales of courage. Hints, tips, instructions, announcements. Party news. Even the theater schedule in Moscow.”

Zaitsev said nothing.

“Vasily. You have killed more than forty Germans in ten days. You are a hero.”

Something swelled and tightened in Zaitsev’s chest. He did not know if it was a good or bad sensation. He imagined a balloon expanding. Too big and it breaks. Enough and it is light, floating.

Again Danilov did not wait. “You have established techniques in your own sniper activities that go beyond what the other snipers are doing. Your methods are very effective. They must be shared with the rest of the defenders. You have shown what can be done by one man and one bullet. Yours is a story that will be told. It must be told because it must be reenacted over and over throughout Stalingrad.”

The commissar looked squarely at Zaitsev. “I speak frankly, comrade. I don’t care if you want to be a hero or not. It’s not my concern. I do care, however, that the rest of Russia knows we are holding out here. I care also that the soldiers in the ruins and trenches believe that heroes are kneeling next to them. You understand, every Red soldier is not a superman. The least we can do is let them know they are fighting at the side of supermen.”

Zaitsev looked at Danilov’s gray grin, set in the thicket of a heavy beard line. It would be a mistake, he thought, if I interpret this chat to be a request for my cooperation. I haven’t been invited by this commissar to a banquet of choices. Yesterday I was a sniper doing my job. Today I’m what ... a hero?

But I can do this. I can be this. This hero.

Danilov touched his pencil to his pad. He began. “You are from the Urals, I understand.”

Zaitsev nodded. “Yes. I am a hunter.”

* * * *

FOUR

IN 1937, WHILE JAPAN AND GERMANY RATTLED SWORDS
at the world, twenty-two-year-old Vasily Zaitsev enlisted in the Red Navy. Born in Siberia, he’d never seen an ocean, and the idea seemed a romantic one. He was stationed in Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast. For five years he kept accounting records and waited for Japan, only seven hundred kilometers away, to attack.

Zaitsev read reports on the German siege of Leningrad, the occupation of the Ukraine, and the battle for Moscow. He listened to Party speeches and read articles about the inconceivable Nazi plan to capture the western third of the Soviet Union. The vast territory was to become a slave colony of farms and forced labor to feed the growing Aryan empire.

Off duty, Zaitsev hunted in the forests above the naval base. Lying in the leaves and rich humus, he trained his rifle on rabbits and deer, pretending they were Nazis. He was at home in the woods. He’d spent much of his boyhood hunting in the taiga, the white-barked birch forests near his home in Ellininski in the Ural foothills of western Siberia. His grandfather Andrei was one of a long line of woodsmen. The old man, lanky and bone white, like the birch forest itself, taught Vasha about the taiga while the boy was barely old enough to chew the meat of the animals they killed. When Vasha was eight, Andrei gave him a bow. Because he had to chase the arrows he shot or else fashion new ones, he studied ways to ration his ammunition, to shoot only when certain. Vasha learned to read tracks and lie in silent ambush, keeping his breathing shallow and his concentration deep.