War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (50 page)

Nikki held his breath.

“Did you see anything, Colonel?”

“Perhaps. I’m not sure, but I might’ve just caught a flash in the same spot where the two snipers were yesterday.”

“Is it the Hare?”

Thorvald’s stunted, buzzing voice carried a grin. “Well, it’s where I believe Zaitsev would be.”

Yes, Nikki thought, it is. Zaitsev, the newspaper hero. He would come to the same spot where his friends had died. His sense of revenge would bend toward the dramatic. The Hare doesn’t know Thorvald, but the colonel knows him. He’s been watching that same spot all day, waiting for the sun to drop just so, to create just such a reflection.

“Put your helmet on the shovel handle again. Move fifty meters to the left, then hoist it and walk to the right.”

Nikki scrambled for the shovel. Behind him, he heard Thorvald speak, or sing, to himself in his nook.

“Here, little rabbit. Here, bunny, bunny.”

* * * *

TWENTY-THREE

“THERE. THERE, VASHA! I SEE SOMETHING. A ... A
helmet. Look. Quick, damn it!”

Zaitsev had just finished his hour-long shift poring over the park through his periscope. His eyes were exhausted. He’d slid on his mittens and been slumped back against the wall for no more than a minute when Kulikov spotted something.

He pulled off the gloves and scrambled fast for his periscope. Kulikov continued to curse.

“Where?” Zaitsev asked, slamming his chest against the wall. He raised the periscope above the bricks. “Where?”

“The wall at the far end of the park. Behind that tank. There. There!”

“Nikolay, calm down. I’ll find it.” This was as animated as he’d ever seen Kulikov. He’s very intrigued by this Headmaster. Oh well, I’ve been living with Thorvald for a week now. Nikolay has just gotten started.

“He’s moving right to left,” Kulikov whispered.

No need to whisper, Zaitsev mused. Thorvald’s close enough for a bullet, but we can still speak normally.

Zaitsev panned across the wall 250 meters away. The sun setting in front of him made it difficult to identify shapes, giving everything in his scope a ghostly aura. Thorvald, of course, knows this. He’s positioned himself so that the sun makes this his time of day, his advantage. Mine was this morning. Thorvald knows that, too; the morning passed with no sign of him.

“Found him?” whispered Kulikov.

Not yet. Not there. Past the tank. Along the wall, not there . . . what is that? Is it a stone? No, it . . . yes, it moved. A helmet, it must be. The range of the periscope was taxed at this distance, but right now Zaitsev trusted Kulikov’s vision and instincts more than his own. Is it actually moving, he wondered, or is Kulikov’s nervous chatter making me want to see it move? “I see it,” he said before he was sure he really did. He watched closely the wavering gray lump at the edge of the wall. His tired eyes slowly began their automatic task of compensating for the glare and the hazy focus of the scope’s optics at this distance. The lump did move. There. Certainly. It was a helmet.

“I see it,” he repeated.

“He’s your meat, Vasha. What do we do?”

Zaitsev watched the swaying helmet. It moved unnaturally, in jerks rising and falling, not at all like a man walking behind the far wall. It was a poor imitation, a helmet on a stick, bobbing as if the wearer had only one leg or were walking on his knees. The wall there was tall enough for a man not to have to walk on his knees to stay covered unless the man were holding up a stick with a helmet on it. No, this is not the Headmaster. The bastard is lying hidden elsewhere, within sight and range, waiting for me to fire as Shaikin and Morozov did. He’s waiting for me to give away my position. This helmet carrier is an assistant, a clumsy assistant.

With a pang, Zaitsev lowered his eyes from the periscope. This lowly ruse, this freshman bit from the Headmaster, insulted him. This was not the opening move he’d anticipated. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it was not this.

“It’s a trick. A very poor one.” Zaitsev blinked to ease the tension around his eyes. “We’ll do nothing.”

Zaitsev and Kulikov watched the helmet rise and fall along the ridge of the brick wall. After several minutes, whoever was carrying it grew weary in the arms and lowered it.

The sun dropped until it lurched below the ruins on the western edge of the park. The light was too low for telescopic sights now. The only target this late in the day, the kind Viktor Medvedev and his bears excelled at would be a lit cigarette or a muzzle flash somewhere in the gathering darkness, not the kind of error the Headmaster would make. Or would he? After all, he’d walked a helmet on a stick in front of the Hare, a disappointment. The Nazi’s far less than brilliant; he was not even craftsmanlike,

Thirty minutes later, after full night had descended, Zaitsev and Kulikov gathered their packs and rifles to leave.

“Where is he?” Kulikov muttered. “Damn him.”

Amused, Zaitsev observed to himself how Nikolay, the quiet one, had grown absolutely talkative over Thorvald.

When they returned to the snipers’ bunker, Medvedev and Tania were waiting. Zaitsev reported on the day’s long inactivity, ending with the helmet ploy. For half an hour he listened to their opinions on what tactics he and Kulikov should employ. Then Kulikov raised himself off the floor in silence and left.

“Did we hurt his feelings?” Medvedev asked.

“No,” Zaitsev said, “but he’s taken this duel with Thorvald personally. My guess is he wants it too much to listen to advice. I don’t know. It might still be Baugderis bothering him. He’ll be all right. I think that’s enough for tonight.”

Medvedev rose from the floor. “Maybe I’ll hunt your park tonight,” he said. “Perhaps the Headmaster smokes.”

Zaitsev laughed. “If he does, light one up for him.”

Across from Zaitsev, Tania sat cross-legged, watching Viktor take his leave.

“How is Shaikin?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I tell myself he’s alive.”

Tania rubbed her palms on her knees. Zaitsev sat with her in the hush, trying to calm the percolating things in his breast that wanted to reach out and pull her in.

She spoke. “Thorvald. Why is he behaving like a freshman?”

Zaitsev shook his head. “To make me think it’s not him. To make me mad. I can come up with ten reasons why he does everything he does. And then I don’t know anything.”

Tania stretched her legs. The outlines of her calves and the stems of her pelvis showed through her white canvas pants.

“The Headmaster wants to know if it’s you he’s facing. He knows you, Vasha. We can assume he’s read all the articles about you. He knows the Hare wouldn’t shoot at a helmet on a stick. When you held your fire today, you told him you were there.”

Tania rubbed her hands together. Then she stopped and looked into her palms as if looking into the bottom of a teacup for mystical clues.

She continued: “He’s being unpredictable. You’re the one who’s acting in a pattern.”

Zaitsev lay back on his bedroll, ignoring her comment. What does she know? he thought. A woman, still mostly a freshman herself. She’s not out there with me staring into the haze and shadows, looking for her own personal assassin. Pattern. The only pattern I’ll follow is this one: When I shoot, somebody dies. One man, one bullet. Thorvald will be no exception.

But Tania’s comment gnawed at him. Is she right? I’m hounded by detail and nuance in this battle with Thorvald. Could she be seeing it more clearly from a distance than I see it up close?

Shit. She’s right. A pattern. Thorvald knows it. One man, one bullet. My stated,
printed
creed. No, not a creed. My damned brag is what it is. He knows it. He’s read it I don’t know how many times in those articles. I ought to wring Danilov’s thick neck for putting all that information about me into
In Our Country’s Defense.
He’s put strings on me, made me into a puppet Thorvald can pick up and make dance. Thorvald knows how I hunt, all my patterns. When I didn’t fire at the helmet this morning, he knew it was me, just like Tania says. And when Shaikin and Morozov did fire yesterday, Thorvald knew he wasn’t facing me then. I should have stopped talking to Danilov, told the little troll there would be no more interviews. But I didn’t, did I? I liked it; I rolled in it like a dog in high grass. And now my smell is so strong, Thorvald can track me with it. Hero? Fucking idiot! I’m facing a supersniper I know nothing about, and he’s staring across no-man’s-land at an enemy he’s read a book on.

And he’s using my tactics against me. Pretend to be a freshman. Lower your enemy’s guard. Make him careless. Irritate him. Rattle his calm, wear down his endurance. The helmet on the stick. Not a stupid ruse at all. It made me angry. He knows it. Worse, he’s lecturing me in my own tactics.

Zaitsev’s mind raced to the dozens of times he’d played these same games with other Nazi snipers. Make them angry, turn the battle into a vendetta, make it personal. He recalled a month ago, one morning near the Barricades, when he’d shot one of two German snipers who’d burrowed behind a railroad mound. After his first bullet, which he was certain had split the nose of the first sniper, he’d raised a sign over his position with the number 10 scrawled on it with a charred stick. The number signified a perfect shot in a marksmanship competition. After a few quiet minutes to let the Nazi boil over the gall of this bizarre Russian sniper, Zaitsev simply put his helmet on the stick. He marched it along the top of the breastwork and, within moments, Chekov knocked down the second German sniper. The hot fool simply couldn’t contain himself and fired on the helmet. The lesson: never let it become personal.

Tania’s right. I’m locked into a pattern. Thorvald has me confused and angry. He’s guiding me as if I were on a bridle. I’ve transformed this duel into a personal vendetta to repay him for killing my hares. He hunted them as the best way to get to me. It worked.

Before Zaitsev could respond to Tania, the bunker’s blanket was pushed aside. The brass buttons of a wool greatcoat, the ones down the chest of Captain Danilov, entered the room.

To Zaitsev, Danilov looked wrong in the snipers’ bunker, even though the commissar had been there many times before. Tonight,
wrapped
so tightly in his duel with the Headmaster, Zaitsev was stung by the fat man’s presence. This is a place for fighters, he thought, men and women who are strong, deadly, vital, and hard. Here is this soft little man, shorter than a hare and wider than a barrel, standing in the middle of the room where others, better than him, have stood and would not stand again. Zaitsev sensed an ugly urge to sit on Danilov or rest the lantern on him as though he were a table.

“Comrades.” Danilov greeted Zaitsev and Tania jovially. The lamp’s sallow light darkened his amiable smile.

“Comrade commissar,” Zaitsev acknowledged the
politrook.
He felt the interruption keenly; he wanted to continue dissecting the Headmaster with Tania for the next day’s hunt.

Danilov did not sit. Good, thought Zaitsev. When he sits, he stays.

“Chief Master Sergeant,” the commissar began, “what happened in the search for the German master sniper today?”

Zaitsev shook his head. “Nothing. But I’m sure I know where he is now. We have agreed, the Headmaster and I, that we should meet across a park downtown.”

“Excellent,” Danilov said. “I like the idea of the park. A wide-open space. Nothing between you but distance. Little to hide behind but your wits. A wonderful scene. I should like to see it.”

Zaitsev’s and Tania’s eyes ran to each other. She heard it, too! Danilov wants to come with me.

“Tomorrow,” the commissar added.

Zaitsev spoke immediately. “No, you can’t go.”

“Certainly I can.” Only Danilov’s lips moved.