Red Sniper: A World War II Thriller

CHAPTER 2

Yegor Barkov had seen his share of bad situations, and he didn't like this one at all. He stood on the marshy plain just west of the Oder River, looking up at the high ground beyond, where masses of German troops were dug in to make their last stand on what was known as the Sellow Heights.

His commander had once pointed out that Barkov was an imaginative man, so it was not surprising that when studying the German fortifications before him, he had the passing thought that this was how the hammer must look to the nail.

He clutched his Mosin-Nagant sniper’s rifle in his big, rough hands and tried instinctively to get the lay of the land so that he could put that rifle to use.

"At least it isn't Stalingrad," said Oleg Tarasyuk beside him. The little man hawked and spat to further illustrate his opinion of Stalingrad. He was also a sniper, and the two had been together through thick and thin during these long years of the war. Where Barkov was massive as a bull, Tarasyuk gave the impression of some small, quick animal that was fond of baring its sharp teeth. He had earned the nickname norka, which was Russian for mink, a furbearer often made into sleek coats but that had a nasty disposition in the wild.

"What do you want to bet that these stupid generals want us to march right into those German guns?"

"Yegor," the Mink cautioned, ever mindful that one of the political officers might overhear. Like a mink, he lived by his wits.

Barkov hadn't needed to say it; they both knew well enough that marching right into the guns was just what was going to happen. Marshal Zhukov had lined up his army across from the Germans entrenched on Sellow Heights. It was the nature of the Soviet army that generals were expected to out-do one another, and Zhukov could sense the other generals snapping at his heels. Stalin encouraged competition over cooperation. It was better to have the generals at each other’s throats, after all, than at his own.

Stalin wanted Berlin so badly that he could taste it, and he did not care how many men it took to overwhelm the German defenses. Lives meant nothing to him. By default, Marshal Zukov could place no value on the lives needed to sweep aside the Germans. The problem was that the Germans did not want to be swept.

Barkov and Oleg had been fighting Germans nearly every inch of the way from Stalingrad, pushing the Germans back, again and again. It was clear by now that the Germans were not simply giving up, so now here they were at Seelow Heights.

Marshal Zhukov had Stalin himself breathing down his neck to make some progress. Hourly telephone calls from Stalin were not unusual. Stalin wanted immediate results, so Marshal Zhukov had developed a brilliant strategy for a full-on frontal assault. If this was going to fail, in Zhukov’s eyes it was best to do so spectacularly. Artillery was being moved in to soften up the German positions first.

From somewhere in front of the Russian lines, a rifle shot rang out. An officer a hundred meters away crumpled and fell. It was the second officer that the German sniper had shot in the last thirty minutes.

The sound of the German sniper at work was like music to Barkov's ears. With any luck, he and the Mink could get themselves assigned to picking off the sniper, which would help them avoid the suicidal slaughter that Marshal Zhukov clearly had planned.

Barkov was no coward, but he was a survivor. One did not last long as a sniper without being wily. What was the point in dying stupidly?

Barkov thought about his options. The political officers to the rear would shoot any man who turned back from the front lines. In the Russian army, courage was strictly enforced at gunpoint. The sniper's rifle was something of a talisman enabling him to move more freely than the average soldier.

"Come on, Oleg. Let us see if we can put our talents to use."

The Mink understood Barkov's meaning at once. The two of them headed toward the rear, with the thought that they could move off to the flank in pursuit of the German sniper. Their chances of survival would be marginally better once the assault began.

They hadn't gone far when a commissar appeared, pointing a pistol at them. There was a dead boy at the commissar's feet, presumably a young soldier whose nerves had failed him and who had been stopped from fleeing with a bullet from the pistol. Only the fact that Barkov and Oleg were calmly walking, rather than running for the rear, kept the commissar from shooting them outright.

"Get back to your positions!"

"Comrade, we have been ordered to move to the flank to engage the German sniper," Barkov said.

The commissar did not lower his weapon. Barkov felt his mouth go dry. It was just like a commissar not to have any appreciation for military strategy. Political officers tended to fall into two categories. There were the ones who were too smart for their own good, and the ones who were too stupid for anyone’s good. This one had a lumpy face like a potato and eyes too small for his head, which seemed to put him into the second category.

In addition to being stupid, the commissar was a scrawny man, and if he had not been holding a pistol — and particularly if he had not been a commissar — Barkov would have taken two steps forward and snapped his neck like kindling.

The political officer nodded and waved them on with the pistol. That was the Soviet army for you, Barkov thought. The generals and the political officers were all eager to kill you before the Germans even had their chance.

"That one was a real shit for brains," Barkov muttered.

The Mink replied, "One of these days you're going to say that too loud, and it's then it's off to the Gulag for you."

Barkov shrugged, and then he and Oleg trudged on toward the flank, where they set up hides for themselves.

Barkov got behind a dead horse, which was starting to stink, but was good for stopping bullets. On the ground, he appeared heavy and shapeless, like a big sack of grain dumped there. The Mink, who was a much smaller man, got into position beside him and scanned the marshland beyond through his telescopic sight. It was their habit when they worked together that the Mink served as the spotter.

"See anything?" Barkov asked.

"No sign of the sniper. But you could probably hit one of those machine gunners from here."

"Good idea."

"Try the one at two o'clock."

Through his scope, Barkov saw a couple of square stahlhelms peeking from above the rim of a trench. They probably thought they were safe — the distance was at the more extreme range for the Mosin Nagant sniper rifle. Meanwhile, the Germans were really chewing things up with an MG 40, spitting twelve hundred rounds per minute toward the Russian lines. The gun fired so fast that it made a sound like tearing paper. Someone had nicknamed it “Hitler’s bone saw.”

As a sniper, Barkov knew his trade after long years of war. He had been born in a remote commune on the edge of Siberia, which was, as an American might say, on the wrong side of the tracks. No one of consequence came from Siberia; it was where Russians were sent to be punished or re-educated. But a Siberian knew how to hunt, and Barkov had moved easily from stalking wolves to stalking men. Barkov also possessed a kind of animal cunning for survival that served him well as a sniper. Like any predator, he possessed a ruthless streak. There was no sentiment in Barkov. He did not sing along when the other Russians sang their ballads, but drank his vodka in silence. He did not write letters home. He did not have faith in Stalin or his commissars. He found his satisfaction in being a good hunter.

He put the post sight of his reticle a foot above the helmet and a little to the right to account for the wind. There was no formula for this — Barkov simply used the experience of a hundred other shots just like this one to aim. He squeezed the trigger. Pop. Down went the German. Barkov lowered his head behind the dead horse's belly, but no one shot back at him.

"You want to move?" the Mink asked.

"I don't think anyone spotted us," Barkov said. "We'll take at least one more shot from here before it gets dark, and then we can find another position."

They still couldn't locate the sniper, so Barkov picked off another German machine gunner. Enough of the man was exposed that this time he took a belly shot, so that the German would scream for a while in agony, discouraging his fellow soldiers. The noise carried on well after dark. Barkov lay there listening the way that some listened to birds singing, a faint smile on his lips.

He and the Mink were just getting ready to move when the Soviet artillery opened up. The ground beneath them rumbled and they both covered their ears. It sounded like the end of the world, and for the Germans on Sellow Heights, it was exactly that.

Unfortunately for his troops, Marshal Zhukov would discover that the Germans defending Seelow Heights were not fools. They could see the Russian artillery moving in, so under cover of darkness the Germans withdrew their forces from the first defensive line and deployed them in the secondary defenses instead. The Russian shells rained down on empty fortifications.

Zhukov had an innovation planned for his nighttime assault. Giant searchlights were maneuvered into place, and switched on as the order to attack was given. Instead of providing illumination as intended, the lights created chaos. The bombardment had filled the humid marsh air with smoke from the exploding shells, along with dust and bits of vegetation that swirled like confetti, all of it mixing together to create a low haze that hung over the ground. The searchlights reaching into this haze created a blinding mist, leaving the Russian army to stumble forward, much like an automobile trying to drive into a wall of fog with its bright beams on.

The Russians couldn't see a thing. Many troops were under the false impression that Zhukov had brought into play some sort of super weapon to turn the tide of battle. How wrong they were.

On their heights, where the shelling hadn’t reached them, the Germans could see the advancing Russians backlit in the fog. The enemy was silhouetted like so many paper targets. Fire from machine guns and small arms poured into the Russian ranks, cutting them to ribbons. Fresh troops pressed forward from the rear.

Barkov and the Mink crept forward, taking their time, yet not so slow that they would earn a bullet in the back from one of the commissars. Thirty minutes passed, then an hour.

The whine and whisper of bullets still filled the glowing darkness. They started stumbling over the bodies of the first ranks of Russian soldiers, mixed here and there were a few dead Germans.

“It looks like our boys caught a German sniper," the Mink announced.

He was standing over a body in the bottom of a shell hole. The man was nearly naked, his trousers down to his knees and his shirt gone, and his torso was covered in cuts. But these were not shrapnel wounds — on closer inspection, it was apparent that he had been sliced and stabbed multiple times by bayonets — no single one of which would have been a killing wound. In the Soviet army, snipers were celebrated as specialized soldiers and heroes. However, German snipers were seen as sneaky, inhuman scum, and treated accordingly. The fast-moving Russians wouldn't have bothered to torture just any soldier, and the fact that he was a sniper was evidenced by the scoped rifle, the muzzle of which had been jammed far up the German’s rectum.

"One less for us to worry about," Barkov said.

The Mink knelt down beside the body. "Hey, this one is still alive, poor bastard. We should finish him off." The Mink moved to shoot the German, but Barkov reached out to stop him.

"Death would be a mercy," he said. "Let him suffer a while.”

The Mink grinned. “Of course. What was I thinking?”

They stayed in the shell hole for a few minutes, getting their bearings. The Mink went through the bloody rags that remained of the helpless sniper's clothes and found some chocolate, which he shared with Barkov. They munched while the man lay there moaning.

From the sounds ahead, it was clear that the attack on Seelow Heights pressed forward. Some military genius had finally figured out that the searchlights were causing more harm than good, and one by one they blinked off, leaving the battlefield illuminated only by small burning fires. By then the damage was already done, however. Bodies blanketed the marshes and hills. Barkov couldn't have known it then, but decades later, the skeletons of the dead would still be turning up whenever there was a heavy rain or a construction project in the vicinity.

The Russian strategy had been to overwhelm the Germans with sheer numerical superiority. For every two Russian soldiers mowed down, another one or two had gotten through the killing fields to make a direct attack on the German positions. Those numbers had been enough. Inexorably, foxhole by foxhole, the defenders of Seelow Heights were being defeated.

"Come on, we don’t want to miss any of the fun,” Barkov said, and together the two snipers trotted in the direction of Berlin, still many miles away.