War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (20 page)

“Nikolay.”

Kulikov, next to Shaikin, fired. He, too, missed.

Zaitsev walked to the next window. Again, he instructed the trainees to fire, one at a time. Each, in his turn, missed.

Zaitsev said, “Partisan.” She held the black cross on the tank’s fender dead in her sights and squeezed smoothly. The rifle kicked. She listened for the
ping
of the hit. There was nothing.

After they had all fired, not one of the hares had struck the insignia. Zaitsev spoke calmly from behind. There was a satisfaction in his voice. Some ruse of his had worked.

“Firing at a wall in a basement is, as you can see, not the same as shooting at a target in the open air. Out here on the battlefield, you must take into account the wind, the humidity, the temperature, whether you are shooting uphill or downhill, even the time of day. Most of you have experience hunting. But none of you is accustomed to firing with a telescopic sight over these kinds of distances. You must develop the shooting instincts of the sniper. You must read the signs the terrain and nature give you. Now look through your sights at the target.”

Tania fixed her crosshairs on the tank’s insignia. Zaitsev’s boots ground on the floor behind her.

“Look just above the fender. Today is cool but bright. The fender is dark. That means it’s going to collect heat. You’ll see heat waves rising off it. Which direction are the heat waves moving, left or right?”

Several voices answered. “Left.”

“Yes. This tells you the wind is blowing from right to left. The waves are barely moving, so the wind is slight. But you’re firing across a wide, open plain. You must reason that the wind is blowing unimpeded. Were it humid, or early in the morning after a cold night, you’d need to adapt your aim for those differences as well. Next, you’re shooting slightly downhill. Take that into account. The trajectory of your bullet will decay faster and you will undershoot. The opposite is true when you’re firing uphill; your bullet will sail and you’ll overshoot. Now turn around.”

Tania lowered her rifle, Zaitsev held a bullet in his fingers straight out from his shoulder.

“When you’re firing a round across a level plane, do you know how long the bullet is in the air?”

Zaitsev dropped the bullet. It clattered on the floor in a fraction of a second.

“That’s how long. Your telescopic sights do more than magnify your target. They help you give the proper loft to your bullet for the distance you’re shooting. This keeps the bullet in the air longer. You must learn to help your scope do its job by taking into account all the factors your bullet has to fight through to reach its target. Turn around and try again, on my signal. Think it through, set it up, then fire.”

Fourteen rifle bolts rammed new cartridges into their chambers. This time, when the shots rang out at Zaitsev’s command, Tania heard the
ping, ping
of many of her squad bouncing rounds off the Nazi tank below.

“Good!” Zaitsev called out. “Good shooting, hares! Let the Nazi bastards in those buildings out there hear you.”

Tania set her scope to 425 meters, adding the one eighth required for shooting downhill. She allowed for windage by granting the right-left wind a millimeter. She waited in the midst of the rifle shots around her. Zaitsev gave her the word. She pulled the trigger evenly. The rifle punched into her sore shoulder.

Ping.

* * * *

AFTER AN HOUR AT THE SHOOTING GALLERY, THE BEARS
walked through the rubble behind them. Zaitsev called the hares away from the windows, telling them to sit and watch quietly.

Like Zaitsev before him, Sergeant Medvedev lectured his group on the advantages of keeping the sun at their backs when setting up a shot. The big Bear called their attention to the tank on no-man’s-land. He explained its significance, then moved carefully to the window sill. In seconds, he lined up his sniper rifle and clanged a bullet off the iron cross.

The hares snickered amongst themselves without rebuke from Zaitsev while one by one the bears missed the target. Medvedev grimaced at them, but it served only to dampen their chuckles, not stop them.

After the dropped-bullet demonstration and the lesson on aiming, the bears began finding the target. The metal-on-metal sound of striking bullets rang in the rail yard below.

Once Medvedev was satisfied with the bears’ marksmanship, he called them away from the windows.

“Come sit beside your comrades, the laughing bunnies.”

Fedya lowered his large frame beside Tania. He crossed his legs and laid his rifle across his lap.

Zaitsev knelt at the front of the assembled trainees.

“This is the end of the second day of your sniper training. Now you know just about everything Master Sergeant Medvedev and I can teach you. You can only add to your knowledge by what you teach yourselves on the battlefield. Practice often, until the windage and distance rules become second nature. And don’t forget: learn not only from yourself but from your enemy. I’ll spare you any more wisdom. I know you’re anxious to use your new rifles on the Nazis. Tomorrow each of you will take part in your first mission as a sniper.”

Fedya whispered to Tania, “Not me. It’ll be my second.”

Medvedev joined Zaitsev at the front of the trainees. He looked to be the essence of the Russian fighter, big, dark, determined. Beside him, Zaitsev seemed small and light, yet like an engine, burning from the inside. They were day and night, these two. But Tania understood their reputations; they might well be the most lethal pair in all the Red Army.

Medvedev began. “Tonight, Sokolov’s Forty-fifth Infantry is crossing the Volga. At least two battalions will be here by dawn. They’ve been given orders to keep the enemy away from the river between the Barricades and Red October plants. German machine gunners have moved to within five hundred meters of the Volga. That places our last ferry landing directly under fire. If we don’t secure this area, the Nazi infantry will follow behind the machine guns and we’ll lose another portion of the riverfront. Tonight you’ll move to positions on the southern side of this corridor to shield the flanks of the Forty-fifth while they get into place in the morning. Chief Master Sergeant Zaitsev and I will come get you at midnight to take you to your positions. For now, you’re dismissed. Go back to your quarters or go down to the shop and take some more practice shots. And get some rest.”

Both groups rose and shouldered their rifles. Fedya stood tall next to Tania. Zaitsev and Medvedev left, wending their way into the rubble. The hares and the bears followed.

Tania said to Fedya, “Stay here.”

He sat while Tania joined the group heading for the stairs. After walking in the rear of the line for a minute, she doubled back. She found him seated at the foot of a window, looking over the rail yard through his scope.

Tania sat next to him. She brought up her own rifle and surveyed the field with him.

“Do you see the railman’s shed?” he asked. “It looks so close through the scope. I can almost see the curtains you were going to put up for me.”

Tania moved her reticle across the shed’s roof. It did not seem close to her. It looked and felt far away.

“Fedushka.” She lowered her rifle. He continued to scan the battlefield. The rifle looks good in his big palms, she thought. He holds it well.

She laid her hand on his shoulder. He lowered the scope.

“Fedushka. Tomorrow morning we go into battle. It starts for us.” She added softly, “Let’s say our goodbyes now.”

He set his rifle down. His gaze went into his hands.

“Please,” she said. “Please, I can’t carry anything more. Don’t add to my weight.” She took his hands in her own. “Another time, Fyodor Ivanovich. Maybe another world.” She smiled. “Say goodbye to me.”

Tania rose and stepped back from the open window to face no-man’s-land; beyond it lay the horribly scarred city, the enemy running through its veins. She put her hands on the sides of his head and kissed him on the forehead. She rubbed his hair.

“Tania,” he said quietly, “I can’t.”

“You will, Fedya. Whether you can or not doesn’t matter. You will. Do it now.”

She slid her fingers down his neck onto his shoulders and pushed away. She left him sitting at the window looking at the dusk dripping over the ruins.

Tania walked away several paces, then turned back to look at his strong, broad outline. His rifle lay at his side. Again, she thought of a stylized image of the Russian soldier, the Red Ivan, defender of the
rodina.
Fedya’s sad vigil was a snapshot of it, a portrait in the dying light framed by the window.

It’s good, she thought. It’s proper that the poet from Moscow sits and stares. Keep your eyes and heart open, Fedushka. We will all need your ppems when this war is over.

* * * *

KOSTIKEV WOKE TANIA IN THE HARES’ QUARTERS. HIS
wound was dressed and he brandished a newer, wider smile to set off his golden teeth. After fifteen minutes and a cup of tea from the samovar, Zaitsev appeared in the doorway.

He brushed back the blanket. “Snipers, ready?”

Zaitsev led the soldiers out into the night wind. Tania hunkered into her parka while they hurried through the network of trenches. She wrapped her hair up under a black watch cap. At the edge of no-man’s-land, Zaitsev did not take them across the rail yard. He turned east toward the Volga.

Walking along the cliffs overlooking the dark water, Tania spotted the outlines of a flotilla disgorging a thousand men onto the threatened landing stage behind the Red October plant. These were the first companies of Sokolov’s division. The sky was quiet; no artillery or darting Luftwaffe planes broke the peace beneath the shrouded moon and the snapping, buzzing breeze.

The hares arrived at a wide avenue between the Red October and Barricades plants. On the south side of the street, Zaitsev deposited his snipers in twos and threes into the tallest buildings. His instructions were to go as high as they could to watch north across the avenue. Nazi activity was expected to build in the wreckage and alleys after word of the Forty-fifth’s arrival spread to German headquarters. The trainees were only to monitor Nazi traffic. They were not to fire unless given the order directly from Zaitsev or Medvedev. The order would come in the form of two red flares from the western end of the street.

“No sense stirring up a hornet’s nest if we can get Sokolov into place quietly,” Zaitsev said. “We’ll hunt later.”

Before dawn Tania was dispatched into a five-story building with the lanky Georgian farmer, Shaikin, and the chubby woman, Slepkinian. They climbed to the top floor. Zaitsev assured them that this side of the street had been swept clean and was firmly in Russian hands. Wary little Shaikin told Tania he’d seen too many unlucky instances where the front line had changed unexpectedly.

“It moves like a snake,” he said of the imaginary line between armies. Grenades in hand, they tiptoed up the stairwell. Tania was sorry Kostikev was not along. But Shaikin, built like a white whip, looked as though he could handle himself. She could not even guess what good the Armenian would be. For two days, Tania had been calling her “the Cow” behind her back.

The three slipped into a room on the western corner of the fifth floor, where they could see both up and across the avenue. Now, piercing the red shadows of dawn with her 4X scope, Tania looked over the broken facades to the German trenches beyond.

She sat as she had the afternoon before in the shooting gallery, at the base of a decimated window. She rested the barrel of her sniper rifle on the lip of a protruding brick, well back and hidden from view. Shaikin and the Cow sat crouched to her right, also eyeing down their scopes from behind cover.

She watched Germans scurry between trenches, following their movements three hundred meters away with her pointed-post reticle fixed on their hearts. A dozen times she imagined herself pulling the trigger. Her vision sharpened with the rising light, and she recalled Zaitsev’s words on marksmanship: think it through three times; set it up twice; fire once.