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Broken Jewel The Betrayal Game The Assassins Gallery Liberation Road Last Citadel Scorched
Earth The End of War War of the Rats Souls to Keep |
Note: The following four chapters were edited out of the original manuscript of War Of The Rats by my publisher Bantam, under the belief that the duel between the two snipers was finished and the book needed to come to a conclusion soon after. However, no question is asked more often when I make public appearances than this: Whatever happened to Zaitsev, Tania and Nikki? These chapters, never before published, tell their fates. —David L. Robbins
The three Stormovik fighters swung low again in their tight V formation over the white steppe into the smoking valley. They dipped low and their machine guns chattered, sounding from a distance like ripping fabric. Zaitsev gazed through binoculars from his unit's trench at the diving planes, watching the fighters tear up the ground and the black figures run over it. The planes finished the run, their fifth over the scrambling troops beneath them. They banked hard and rose up out of the far end of the valley, their wings ninety degrees to the ground. In the fighters' wake, clusters of artillery exploded in the Germans' midst. Pillars of dirt and snow leaped into the air, stitching havoc into the earth with black craters and tumbling bodies. Nazi tanks and vehicles - those which were not burning and could still maneuver - swerved crazily, their drivers unsure whether to flee or fight. Either choice will end the same, Zaitsev thought, watching. The artillery barrage lasted for fifteen minutes. The Germans running over the snow were defenseless, caught out in the open steppe. To Zaitsev's eyes, they resembled ants running from a stamping foot. For the past two weeks since the turn of the New Year, the battle for control of Stalingrad was fought not in the city center but out here on the steppe. The city streets and fortresses had become a secondary concern for Stalin and his generals. There, Gen. Chuikov and his downtown army of grizzled veterans had pummeled the Nazis into a standstill. The principal military goal for the Red Army now was to squeeze the ring tighter to choke the enemy from all sides. This would speed either the capitulation of 6th Army or its elimination. Seeing the main action shift from the city factories to the open spaces, Lt. Zaitsev requested duty on the ring. For the time being, he traded his long sniper rifle for a submachine gun. Zaitsev's duel with Colonel Thorvald back in November across the no-man's-land of the park had been his peak, and he knew it. Before and during the confrontation, he'd been the darling of both the generals and the battlefield press, Danilov in particular. He was the Hare, leader of the Russian sniper movement, winner of the Order of Lenin. Then things changed, one at a time. First, Danilov was wounded and evacuated. Then he won his duel with Thorvald. The next day, the Russian counterattack struck against the Germans. Tania was badly wounded weeks later in December, and the battles in the city center, his hunting grounds, became less pivotal, with fewer meaningful targets for his cadre of snipers as the more vital action took place out on the steppe. Several times, he led small forays against German positions like the one where Tania was hurt. That mission, to kill von Paulus, was doomed from the beginning; it turned out later that the intelligence reports putting the German general at the Gorki Theater downtown were faulty. von Paulus was that night at his headquarters out on the steppe at Gumrak Airport. For Zaitsev, the kills became meaningless against a hapless, starving, freezing opponent. He did not even record his hits anymore in his journal, without Tania to witness them. When he laid her down on the aid station table beside the Volga, bleeding from her gut, he felt as if he had laid a wounded part of himself down. Her injury was terrible. But she was alive when he reached the aid station below the Lazur with her in his arms. An awful amount of her blood had spilled onto his uniform and boots. As he laid her on the table, a flurry of nurses' white hands descended on her. Her shredded tunic was cut away; gauze was shoved into the wound which flapped open like a fish mouth. He waited outside the aid station for several hours. He tried to speak with several medical personnel about her condition but only one doctor stopped for him. The exhausted physician spoke frankly and quickly: he despaired for Tania's life. But the man agreed with Zaitsev: she was a strong woman. Perhaps she would survive. Both men looked at each other, wearing her blood. The doctor told him there was nothing more to be done. He would wait by Tania; Zaitsev should return to the fighting. That was how he could best serve Tania. Zaitsev left and walked back to his bunker to make his report. As he left, looking out over the Volga, he pleaded with his spirits to stay behind and guard her. Then Zaitsev realized that Tania had become his barrier, his only barrier he discovered, between his soul and the devilry of the war. She had whispered to him many times how her spirit returned to her flesh only when lying or hunting with him. Without him, she lived in a dead body, she said, totally without the passion and remorse of the living. For Zaitsev though, it was opposite. His spirit was locked within his body. It was just the simple spirit of a boy hunter from Siberia, a teenage engineering student, a navy clerk, a lone hunter of foxes and rabbits, regardless of his short-lived notoriety as a super sniper. Tania pulled his spirit up out of his body and lent it wings to help it fly higher. Without her in this last month, his soul sat crouched like a gargoyle. He returned to being nothing more than a hunter of men, a distant assassin of magnified images, with nothing grander in his life than his sniper journal, now disregarded and lying unopened in his bunker. Living for a time as he had with the passions of Tania, the duel with Thorvald, and Viktor, Danilov, the hares, all of them wrapped in the vicious battle for the city, he was tested and purified in a daily crucible. He knew, deeply then, that he was a brave man, a hero, just as Danilov had written about him a dozen times. Also, he was a lover; the testimony was Tania's rough nails clawing down spine. Without them all, he was only a killer, crawling over the snow behind shards of metal to shoot at a beaten enemy. As he left the aid station and walked away from Tania, he felt that was walking down a strange road without a map, into a cave without a torch. On January 3rd, Zaitsev received his transfer as per his request and left Stalingrad. He rode a truck over the Volga across planks laid atop the frozen river. He was given a four-day rest at Krasnaya Sloboda. While there, he looked for news of Tania at the central emergency hospital. If Tania survived her injury, she would have been evacuated there. His whole first day in Krasnaya Sloboda, he tried to find some hint of her fate. The doctors and nurses he questioned there had little time for conversation. Zaitsev found record-keeping to be one of the many victims of the conditions in the emergency hospital. There was no trace of her. He did not know if she died in Stalingrad on the table where he laid her or if she made it this far to the east bank. Again, as he had at the aid station where he left Tania, he reached an impasse where there was nothing more he could do. He had lost Tania's track. He wished the partisan well, told her he missed her and swore to avenge her somehow. He moved to a barracks for sleep, hot food and a shower. On the 7th, Zaitsev recrossed the river north of the city. He joined the hundred thousand men of the 24th Army under Voronov. On the afternoon of the 8th, he waited with the rest of the Red Army for the results of a surrender offer tendered that morning by Russian command to von Paulus. The terms of surrender were generous but were also accompanied by a promise from the Russian generals to annihilate 6th Army if it continued to resist. The next day, after a cease fire, the offer was rejected by von Paulus. Zaitsev guessed the decision was made by Hitler himself. He must have been the one to refuse, sitting in a castle somewhere in Germany, for anyone who had seen the suffering of 6th Army firsthand could not possibly ask them to fight another minute. The piles of German bodies Zaitsev walked past in the snow, gathered up by the punishment details of the 24th for mass burning, were emaciated. Many had been stripped of clothing by their retreating comrades. Several had died with empty rifles and pistols in their hands, their ammunition spent. At 0805 the morning of January 10th, the Russian forces attacked in a massive action, opened by a solid hour of artillery bombardment across the German positions. At precisely 0900, a thousand Russian tanks and waves of infantry leaped into the fray. The ring was drawn tighter by the hour. The Reds drove deep into the German forces, taking back in a day hundreds of square kilometers which had taken the Nazis months to attain. German infantry and motorized divisions fought bravely but without stamina. They were like an eggshell, hard but thin on the outside, soft inside. They shattered quickly. As the offensive continued through its first week, Zaitsev sensed a growing tension in the Russians he fought beside on the steppe. Twice in the first several days of the offensive, his men were ordered to take part in the rounding-up of surrendering Nazi soldiers. Zaitsev's unit was assigned to take prisoners and guard them on a five kilometer march to the Russian rear. There, they would turn their captives over to a processing detail to see the prisoners to captivity, probably in Siberia. Late one afternoon, following a blistering artillery barrage over a German company, Zaitsev led his unit of twenty-two men out of their trenches to face the surrendering force of about two hundred enemy soldiers. His unit walked out to meet the Germans. Zaitsev noticed his men talking nervously among themselves. This was the first time for all of them to be so near the enemy without fighting them. On that first encounter with the defeated Germans, many of Zaitsev's soldiers cursed and physically abused the Germans as they herded them into lines for the march. While walking west with the prisoners over the steppe, he saw several of the Germans beaten with rifle stocks if they stumbled or objected in any way. Zaitsev feared the great hatred he knew was burning in his men for the Germans. To a man, their passions had been stoked to a blaze by the destruction of their homeland, the cruelty of the invading forces and the rhetoric of loathing promoted non-stop by the Communists. Each man carried the pain of the Rodina in the same hands he carried his machine gun. Zaitsev understood their anger but felt none of it. He had spent his passion, laid it down a month ago, ripped open, in Stalingrad. Three days after the first prisoner round-up, Zaitsev's unit was again given collection and guard duty. He and his unit watched from their positions for twenty hours as a German company of over two hundred men was hacked at by Russian artillery and tanks until they could hold out no longer. The Germans sent up a white flag, then stood up straight and still, their hands reaching over their heads. They pleaded, "Nicht schiessen. Nicht schiessen." for several minutes. The voices of the Germans mingled with the rattling of their rifles as they dropped them onto the packed snow to make the surrender complete. Zaitsev rose first out of the trench into the battle haze. He walked forward at the head of his men, leading them out to the advancing, pleading Germans. Suddenly, as he walked with his men, he felt a buzz in the air. He stopped in the snow and looked around at his unit. The twenty-two men ignored him, striding past him, moving in long, angry strides toward the surrendering, ragged Nazis. The slaughter began with a single, anonymous Red soldier. One short burst from a machine gun stabbed into the crowding Germans. It was followed immediately by a shocked quiet. The few hit Nazis fell and writhed on the snow, dying and betrayed. Over their moans, one of his men shouted "Bastards!" The machine guns opened up. Zaitsev tensed to act to stop the men, but he did not know what to do. Even though he was now an officer, a lieutenant, he realized he was powerless then. He was a stranger to these soldiers, had only been with this unit for five days. The killing started so quickly and, before he could react, the machine guns were in full squall. He froze, his hands squeezing white on his own machine gun. He watched and waited as the horror swelled and mounted in tumbling red and black, the machine guns hiding the coughing screams of the thrashing Germans. In moments, the misery reached an unbearable point where it stopped itself, it seemed, to breathe. In the dazed lull, Zaitsev stepped forward, easing the tension with his voice, calmly issuing orders he hoped would replace the murderous intentions in the men's hearts. He commanded his panting, wide-eyed unit to step back. He pointed at five men who had not participated in the melee and ordered them to dispatch the wounded with single pistol shots to the head. The rest of the men would stack the dead. Any German alive who wished to surrender was to be taken prisoner, unharmed. Anyone violating this order would himself be shot by Zaitsev. This was said matter-of-factly, not to arouse anger but to exercise his authority. Zaitsev waited and felt his words take hold. The men quivered, then shuffled to their tasks. He turned his back on the terrible spectacle. He did not want to remember it so well. Zaitsev had learned as a child in the taiga to kill only what he needed, no more. Never shed blood for pride or out of anger, he was taught. Hunt only to stay warm or to eat. Anything in the taiga that killed senselessly, like a rogue wolf, bear or big cat, was itself hunted down and killed. There were rules for killing, rules to preserve the dignity of both the hunter and the prey. Never kill too much or too easily, his grandfather said, or you kill a piece of yourself. In recent weeks, he had heard of episodes in other units where the same out-of-control massacres happened and went unpunished. He recognized this as a tacit sanction by the generals and even Stalin as a way of adding to the disposal of the Germans with a vengeful prejudice. Zaitsev felt it was rabid, almost genocidal. When the Red counter-offensive swept around the Germans back in mid-November, there were almost three hundred thousand soldiers alive inside the ring. Now, their numbers had been chopped down to fewer than a hundred thousand. When would it stop? Why won't 6th Army surrender all at once and stop this piecemeal blood-letting? It was plain to Zaitsev the German forces in Stalingrad were being sacrificed by their own leaders, for what end he did not know. Now, he looked up above the morning valley to see the three Stormoviks scud above him and his waiting unit. The artillery which had pounded for a quarter-hour into the middle of the Nazi troops in the valley below him halted. The Stormoviks streaked down the rim of the valley to his left to turn and gather for another slashing run over the Nazis. The silence over the steppe was temporary, he knew. This was the Russian method of closing the circle. Smash at the enemy without mercy, then pause once between assaults to give the Nazis a chance to surrender. The loudspeakers of the politrooks up and down the line crackled into action, calling for the Germans' submission. The three fighters zoomed behind Zaitsev's head. In another few minutes, each plane would bank and come in low for another sortie. Then more artillery would follow and, finally, a Russian infantry charge to punish the Nazis for not surrendering. A slashing fury of bullets and bayonets would be the end of the several thousand enemy soldiers in his binoculars. As the engine noises of the fighter planes faded fast to his right, Zaitsev discerned at last the cries of the enemy filling the valley, like a swollen tide of despair. "Nicht schiessen!", they hollered, a thousand voices in chorus. And, in Russian, "We surrender!" They learned this phrase in our language, Zaitsev thought; they had it prepared. Tania had always been right about the Germans. In the days when their powers were full here in Stalingrad, they behaved not like men but monsters, "sticks," she called them, refusing to recognize them as humans. Now, in defeat, he thought, look at what walks toward us out of the mist: monsters, again. Yet, this time, they are no longer demons of power but of ugliness and hopelessness, writhing at the very bottom of the human condition. Zaitsev stared through the binoculars at the approaching, stumbling swarm, their hands in the air or behind their heads. Scraps of cloth bound their heads and feet. As they came closer, he noted pointed chins and hideous blue lips, cheeks hollowed under tight skin. Starvation bulged in their darting eyes. Zaitsev lowered his binoculars. He picked up his PPSh machine gun and stood. Behind him, his twenty-two men rose to their feet. He heard the clatter of their guns rising with them. "Let's go welcome them, boys. Let's be sharp." he said to his unit. He did not say more. No need to give them ideas, he reasoned, if they don't have them already. But watch them, Vasily, he told himself. You are their leader. Then, lead. But what can I do if it happens again? Shoot my own men? Even if I say I will do it, I won't. What can I do? The hares were never this angry. We trained it out of them, even slapped it out of them. A sniper is cool in the head, even if his heart is hot. Tania learned. She was harder to teach than any of the others, yet she learned. Zaitsev led his men into the small valley. The three Stormoviks skittered to the eastern side of the surrendering force, patrolling it to herd them west into the hands of their Russian captors. A group of about a hundred Germans approached his men slowly, carefully, as if walking on cracking ice. When Zaitsev and his unit were within twenty meters of the Germans, he became aware of their smell on the wind. He had not noticed the odor the other times his unit had taken prisoners. But there it was, a caustic smell like bile, or acid. Looking at the gaunt faces of the soldiers standing there like cows, mute and waiting, he guessed it was the stench of starvation, of a hundred bodies consuming themselves. "All right." Zaitsev said, shouldering his rifle to show his men these Germans posed no danger, "put them in lines. Let's move them out." To the Nazis, he called out some of the German taught to him by Tania. "Hande hoch! Schnell!" Zaitsev's men stepped forward. He heard some of them talking as they walked past him. "Damn. They stink." "They're pigs, what do you expect?" Another soldier laughed. "Yeah, pigs." This last man began to snort, imitating the crude noises of a hog. Other men in the unit picked up the sound as they circled the surrendering Germans. The Nazis seemed to understand the insult, glancing around at the Russians fearfully but without complaint. The Russian soldiers shoved the Germans into lines with the butts of their machine guns. The pig grunting swelled as they closed in on the shuffling, slipping captives. "Move, you bastards!" the men of the unit shouted. "Move, piggy! Snort! Snort!" Zaitsev watched his men carefully. The prisoners were forming lines, five abreast. They moved sullenly, obviously still shaken from the day-long bombardment followed by their sudden surrender. These taunting Russian boys with machine guns scared them and shamed them. "That's enough!" Zaitsev shouted to his unit, walking around them now. "Just do your jobs!" Zaitsev heard another grunt, followed by laughter from some of the men. One soldier asked another, loud enough for Zaitsev to hear, "Who the fuck is he?" The soldier was answered by another voice. "Big shot." Another grunt. Another German soldier was clubbed to his knees as he moved too slowly into line. It's building again, Zaitsev thought. I can feel it. What can I do? I can't let it happen this time, got to move first before it gets out of my power. He looked at the prisoners. A hundred sets of German eyes were fixed on him, wincing, asking him, the officer, if he could control his men and save their lives. Slowly, one by one, the Germans lowered their hands from above their heads. Zaitsev knew: these men sense the presence of their executions like farm animals near the ax. The anger in their captors' voices and faces was growing too fast. These Germans, who for months had faced death in war from every quarter, were readying themselves to die in captivity this morning. They were resolved to remain men; after all they had endured they were refusing to enter into death now with their hands over their heads like butchered meat. "Hey, Lieutenant," one of his men called out, "why don't you take a quick walk?" Here it comes, he thought. What can I do? Then, from the group of Germans, huddled tightly inside the circle of snorting Russians like sheep inside a ring of yowling dogs, a voice shouted out in rough Russian. "Lieutenant, if you will kill us, do it! We are no pigs! Bastards, yourselves!" One of them understands Russian, he thought. Maybe he is an officer. An interpreter. A man to speak with. I can... Suddenly, Zaitsev heard the whistle of an artillery shell. Too late, he knew at once. Damn, too late. It is close. "Down!" a Russian screamed. Everyone dove into the snow. Zaitsev made quick decision. He stood erect, spreading his feet to remain steady. He looked at the backs of the soldiers, green and grey, all lying together in the snow around him. He stood as the shell tumbled down, wondering where it would strike. He could tell from the uneven whine of the shell that it was what they called a "mule," a tumbler, falling end over end instead of spinning on balance. It was a misfire; it was impossible to predict where it would land by its braying whistle. His skin tingled as he braced and stared straight ahead. He waited through the first heartbeat. For so long he had crawled through the rubble of Stalingrad; now he stood. He stared at the living men on the ground after gazing for months at them through his scope, a destroyer of silent images far away, images of men who did not even know the invisible Vasily Zaitsev was their death, men who beckoned their bullets simply by being alive on foreign soil. He stood now, after so many bodies who would not stand again, men he had killed with only a squeeze of his finger and a snap into his shoulder. Here, in these few moments, these Germans lay not far away but close at his feet, helpless and beaten. These men had not beckoned bullets beneath his crosshairs but had asked him with their hungry eyes for mercy and for their lives. Zaitsev knew for a certainty if he dove with the others to seek cover from the falling shell his unit would resume their hostility the moment they leaped to their feet from the snow. The explosion would surely be the spark to set off another massacre. Only seconds before, his unit had been walking a razor's edge between anger and murder. The Germans knew it. He knew it. He could not let it happen again. I'll hold my position, he thought as the mule closed in. When the blast is gone, I'll hold my command. They'll see "who the fuck" I am. I am the Hare. The shell exploded fifteen meters to Zaitsev's right. The ground beneath him leaped, tripping him back a step. A high burst of fire flew up out of the earth. A cloud of dirt and snow trilled around him on the crest of the shock wave's punch. Zaitsev was struck across his front by the jolt. Debris from the explosion splattered against him. A dagger of shrapnel pierced his right arm below the elbow. The sudden pain widened his eyes, lifting his head. Then his eyeballs were jabbed as if slammed by spikes. In an instant of flashing lights and swirling shapes, his vision went dark, like a lantern hurled down into a pit. Zaitsev's right arm burned. His ears rang. His hearing felt rammed in by two fingers trying to touch in the center of his head. He tried to bring his hands up to his face to rub his eyes; his right arm dragged. It felt longer, heavier, like a wooden club at his shoulder. With his left hand only, he dug into his closed sockets. He shook his head hard. The effort unbalanced him. He staggered backward, struggling to keep his feet on the snow. The pain in his eyes kept them clamped tight. He tried with his fingers to pry apart the lids of his left eye but found only the prick of needles in his head, and tears. The rattle of his own machine gun, the strap falling off his shoulder as he stumbled, reached in through the clotting in his ears. It rang with the muted sound of a shovel digging on the other side of a cave-in. Zaitsev fought down his rising panic. Can't see, can't hear. I'm hurt, wounded, how bad? How bad, am I bleeding? My arm, on fire. My eyes, blinded. Balance, stay up. I'm on my feet. Don't fall. Stay up. He lowered his left hand away from his face. He shook his head again and swallowed. Dirt and grit were in his mouth. He breathed in hard. The cold air kicked in his throat like spurs to jangle his senses, righting them. What do I look like, he wondered? Am I black and smoking like a piece of charcoal? I must look tough to kill. Where am I facing? He turned his head, trying to hear his men rising from the snow, their rifles in their hands, grenades on their belts. Voices. There, he thought, on the other side of this dark, baffling wall I'm behind. Turn to the voices. He felt the darkness crawling around his insides like a panther looking for its chance to jump. Don't fall down, Vasily. Hold me up, spirits. Zaitsev caught the sliding machine gun strap in his left hand. He grabbed the gun with both hands and tilted the barrel straight up. He moved his right hand, which felt far away with an abyss of pain between him and his fingers, to the trigger and pulled. A volley, long and hot, burst from the barrel, shaking the spikes of pain hammered into his right arm. The report banged at his ears, giving off the sound of a heavier tool now reaching for him in his cave. He relaxed the trigger. The report left a new, higher buzz in his ears. He tried to open his eyes. The lids fluttered; his eyes crossed in agony behind them, making him lower his brow and tip his head like a cross-eyed idiot. He clamped his eyes shut. This is the game, then, he told himself. No ears. No eyes. One hand. Go. "Take these men prisoner!" he shouted. The effort sent his waning senses into a spin. He viewed himself for a moment from his outside. He was a blind, deaf fool, firing into the air, shouting orders and facing the wrong direction. "Anyone harming these prisoners will be punished!" His own words in his ears were weak, cottony; how much force can they have, he wondered? "There has been enough killing!" he shouted. "These men are prisoners!" Zaitsev stood rooted in the snow. He relaxed against the darkness, as if it were a giant black hand wrapped around him. The weight of the machine gun he held up in his left hand grew intolerable. He lowered it and let it fall out of his grasp. He felt it land against his foot. He sensed his lungs working hard. Cold air stung his lips and nose like wasps of frost. His mouth was dry. Everything felt close to Zaitsev. Barbed edges of midnight and silence swirled just beyond his skin. The lines and corners, distance and directions, light and shadows of the world he had long moved through with the keenest senses of a hunter now became dense, all packed into blackness and silence. He was engulfed; he was alone, the only man in this new dark world. Much fought for his attention. The pain in his arm, his fight to remain balanced and standing, his clenched, stabbing eyes, distant scraps of sound around him, the men and the prisoners he feared for, all were claxons of alarm going off inside him. Zaitsev's head grew light as a balloon, threatening to drift off his neck. The ground behind him rose up to invite his back like a bed; he could just rock back on his heels and be done with it and skidded away across the Volga on a death sled. Suddenly, hands touched his shoulders and chest. He jerked, shrugging them off. I'm alone in this blind world, stay out! he thought. Who is that? The touches were firm, insistent. Did they reach me, he wondered? Did they dig down to me, can they carry me out of here? "No killing." he said to the bodies he sensed around him now. Their hands tried to lay him down. He would not bend. His was a standing world. "No killing." The hands pushed at him harder. They want me off my feet. His world began to tilt. "We're not animals!" he shouted, up into the closeness around him. A hand patted his shoulder. Another took up his burning right arm. He shook his head and swallowed. "We're not animals." The icy pang of snow bit into the rear of his neck. He felt the ground against his back. Many hands let him go. The alarms inside him were quenched, one by one. He felt as if he were walking through a mine shaft. The flame in his right arm was a torch. He could see the walls of the mine. Silver flashes, like lightning, rippled and pulsed through the walls. He walked on and discovered the tunnel was a well, leading down. No, he was already at the bottom. The walls of the well led upward.
The lightning stopped. The darkness softened and spread. |
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