War of the Rats: A Novel of Stalingrad

ONE

NIKKI MOND LOOKED OUT OF THE TRENCH INTO A smeared gray dawn.

The first light of the late October sky stayed clenched in a fist of smoke and dust. Fires from the night’s bombing chattered in the rubble. Burned tanks and trucks smoldered on the front line four hundred meters away, pulsing greasy oil smoke. Brick and concrete dust put a dry, chalky taste on every breath.

Nikki laid down his rifle to stretch his back and legs. He opened his canteen; he did not swallow the first dram but rinsed the dust from his mouth. He hadn’t touched the canteen in the night. Thirst helped keep him awake on watch.

“Let me have some of that.” Private Pfizer walked up to start the new watch. “I feel like I’ve been breathing dry shit all night.”

Nikki handed him the canteen.

Fifty meters away, Lieutenant Hofstetter came out of the officers’ bunker shaking on his gray coat. He buttoned it casually while he walked to the two soldiers. Nikki and Pfizer stiffened at his approach. He waved them off with a yawn.

“Too early for that.”

“Yes, sir,” Nikki answered.

“Anything to report, Corporal?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, the Reds never leave anything quiet for long. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Hofstetter took Nikki’s binoculars, then stepped onto a dirt riser. The officer raised his head slowly above the top of the breastwork and brought the binoculars to his eyes. Keeping his head level, he slowly surveyed the ruins of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory.

“Nothing,” Hofstetter said. “Good. I think the Ivans took the night off.”

Pfizer held the canteen up to the lieutenant. “Sir, have a drink on that.”

Hofstetter lowered the binoculars. Turning broadside to the revetment, he raised the canteen and tilted his head back to take a long draught.

The lieutenant spasmed suddenly and threw the canteen into Pfizer’s face. Water erupted from the officer’s mouth, muffling a gurgled cry. His head whipped to the side; the canteen and binoculars fell from his rising hands. He tumbled.

The crack of a single, distant rifle flew past the trench. It circled over the morning like a buzzard, then was gone.

The lieutenant collapsed on Pfizer’s legs. The private’s face froze. He kicked the body off and scrambled to the opposite wall, ramming his back into the dirt.

Nikki snapped to his senses. He threw himself against the wall next to Pfizer, crouching low. He slid forward to lay his hand on the officer’s back. There was no breath.

Nikki looked at the officer’s helmet, still strapped under the chin. A red-rimmed hole gaped in front of the black eagle against a gold background, the emblem of the Third Reich. Blood leaked under the helmet to wet hair and ears, pooling on the Russian dirt. The lieutenant’s left foot shivered once, quivering in the puddle spilling from the canteen.

“Fucking snipers,” mumbled Pfizer. “We’re half a kilometer from the front line. How can they hit us here?”

Nikki recovered his binoculars and canteen. He looked down on the lieutenant. Nikki had seen tides of death in the past two months. Death was part of the Stalingrad landscape; it was melted into the broken bricks and shattered skyline. He bore it on his back now like scars from a lashing.

Nikki put a hand under the private’s arm. “Go get help moving the body.”

Pfizer scrambled to his feet. Without looking back at the corpse, he bent low and hurried up the trench to bring back the punishment detail, soldiers who’d been caught drinking, fighting, or sleeping on watch and were given the duty of collecting bodies.

Nikki moved away from Hofstetter and sat. Dawn had taken hold. Green and red recognition flares lofted into and out of the sky to mark the German positions so that the Luftwaffe could avoid bombing their own men in the morning’s opening sorties. Russian tracers flashed above, reaching for the screaming fighter planes. Flames danced in the decimated buildings while the constant flares exploded, flickered, and faded.

Waiting for Pfizer to return, Nikki composed letters in his head. He wrote a lie to his father on the family dairy farm in Westphalia. He told the old man not to worry; the war in the East was nearing an end, the Russian resistance was buckling. To his older sister, a nurse in Berlin, he wrote the truth, for he knew she was seeing the broken remains of this campaign firsthand in her beds and wards. Finally he drafted a letter to himself, a twenty-year-old corporal of the Wehrmacht dug in on the Eastern Front, crouched only meters from a fresh corpse. In his own letter he could neither lie convincingly nor tell the truth completely.

VASILY ZAITSEV PULLED THE BOLT BACK FAST. THE smoking casing made no sound when it landed on the dirt beside him.

At his elbow, big Viktor Medvedev bore down through his telescopic sight. The first shot had been Zaitsev’s; if a second target appeared above the German trench, Viktor would take it.

Zaitsev counted slowly under his breath to sixty. In one minute, whether or not Viktor pulled his trigger, they would move. That was the sniper’s first rule of survival: pull the trigger, then pull out. Every shot can betray your position to eyes you cannot see but which are watching everywhere on the battlefield. Never stay in one shooting cell so long that it becomes your grave.

Zaitsev was sure his bullet had hit. The canteen was the first thing he’d seen, a round shape bobbing above the trench. He’d almost fired then: at a distance of 450 meters, it was hard to tell a canteen from a man’s head. He’d increased his pressure on the trigger and waited. Five seconds later the head popped right into his crosshairs. Careless, stupid, dead German.

Viktor waited now for another target to move into his sights. On occasion a bullet blowing out the back of a man’s skull would make the soldier next to him grab his rifle or his binoculars and search vengefully for the Russian sniper who had killed his officer or his friend, who had laid the silent crosshairs on him and snuffed his life with a single bullet fired from somewhere in the ruins. The shocked survivor sometimes vomited up one brave and loyal act for the still-shaking corpse beside him. Zaitsev and Viktor hunted courage as well as stupidity.

A minute passed. Zaitsev nudged Viktor.

“Time, Bear.”

Medvedev lowered his scope. He and Zaitsev crept backward from the pile of bricks they’d hidden behind since before sunup, only fifty meters from the front line in no-man’s-land. In a shallow depression, the two pulled dirty muslin sacks from their backpacks. They slid their rifles inside the sacks and attached ropes, then slipped away into the surrounding debris without them. This close to the front line, the rifles jiggling on their backs could bring the two snipers unwanted attention.

It took them five minutes to slither thirty meters across an open boulevard, then into the shell of a building. They reeled in the sacks slowly to betray no motion in the rising light.

They sat in the building for an hour, in case a Nazi sniper had seen them enter and was waiting for them to leave. The wait would try the enemy’s patience—make him wonder if he’d missed them—as well as probe his physical ability to stay focused through his crosshairs for sixty empty minutes.

Zaitsev reached into his pack for his sniper journal. He scribbled in it, then handed the worn notebook to Medvedev.

“Sign this, Viktor.”

Medvedev read the record of the day’s kill: 17/10/42. NE quadrant, Tractor Factory sector. German bunker. Forward observer. 450 meters. Head shot.

He signed. Spotter—Medvedev, V. A. Sgt. With a quick scrawl, Viktor sketched a pair of round ears, a snarling snout, and slitted, angry eyes. Under it he wrote “the Bear.”

Master Sergeant Viktor Medvedev was a Siberian, a broad-shouldered, dark, and powerful man. His name came from medved, the word for “bear.” His partner was another Siberian, Chief Master Sergeant Vasily Zaitsev. Zaitsev had the round, flat face of a Mongol. Smaller than Viktor, he was wiry, yellow-haired, and quick, a scrambler. His name sprang from zayats, “hare.”

Zaitsev and Medvedev were the only members of their division’s sniper unit who worked directly along the front line. The other dozen shooters stayed burrowed in the rubble a few hundred meters back. Working so close to the Germans called on all their skills as hunters, testing their nerves and cunning, but it enabled the two Siberians to shoot several hundred meters deeper into the German rear. Their crosshairs found not just infantry, machine gunners, and artillery spotters, the fodder of war, but unsuspecting officers.

Viktor dug from his pack a half-full bottle of vodka. He inclined the lip toward Zaitsev. “Nice shooting, Hare.” He took a swallow, then put the bottle in Zaitsev’s outstretched hand. Zaitsev tipped it.

Viktor laughed. “You’ve got more patience than me.”

Zaitsev wiped his lips. “How so?”

The Bear laughed harder. “I would have shot that fucking canteen.”

SS COLONEL HEINZ VON KRUPP THORVALD FACED THE applause.

His students clapped, fifteen of them who’d gathered on the distance range to see their teacher, the headmaster of the SS’s elite sniper school, win a bet.

Lieutenant Brechner strode forward, ten marks in his hand. He laid the money in his colonel’s outstretched palm, then bowed in a theatrical burst.

Thorvald accepted the money and returned the bow. He reached out to the puffing private who’d run back from one thousand meters across the field with the paper target.

Thorvald held the target up to Brechner and stuck his index finger through the perforation in the center of the bull’s-eye. He waggled the finger. “This is a worm,” he said, “sticking out of a Russian’s head.”

The men laughed. The remarkable ability of their colonel to make such spectacularly long shots was useless as a military tactic, for at such a distance it was impossible to tell if a target deserved shooting. Nonetheless it was an impressive feat, one that Brechner at least was willing to wager ten marks to witness.

“That’s just how I got them in Poland,” Thorvald said, handing his Mauser Kar 98K with a 6X Zeiss scope to the private, his attendant. “Two hundred of them. Back in thirty-nine.”

Part of Thorvald’s teaching philosophy was that his students should aspire to be like him: confident, calm on the trigger. They need not emulate his flabbiness and bookish nature, but he desired to see intellect in their marksmanship. He wanted them to reason out their shots, replacing the body—the enemy of the sharpshooter, with all its distractions and throbbing motion—with the still, sharp focus of the mind. He desired to see them behave and shoot like Germans.

Daily, Thorvald told stories of his own exploits on the battlefield as part of their training here in Gnössen, just outside Berlin. This morning, after the early practice session and the bet by Brechner, he gathered his charges under a large oak and had coffee served. While they sipped and settled on the grass, Thorvald told this class of young, eager snipers the tale of the Polish cavalry charge.

Within forty-eight hours of Germany’s invasion of Poland, begun September 1, 1939, Thorvald had been transferred as a sniper to the Fourteenth Army under General Heinz Guderian. It was Guderian and his staff who’d conceived the lightning strikes, the overwhelming blitzkrieg tactic combining waves of air and land bombardment with highly mobile tanks and armored infantry. In the opening days of the Polish invasion, Thorvald, then a captain, found himself on his first live battlefield with little to do while the German forces easily split the Poles into fragments. Above the front lines, the Luftwaffe’s Ju-87 Stuka bombers perforated the enemy’s lines with their low-level, screaming accuracy. Then came a flood of armored cars, motorcycles, and tanks. Next came the rumble of infantry and artillery. When weaknesses were found, the German infantry knifed through to fan out into the rear, cutting communications and surprising supply stations.

By the third morning, the Polish army had fallen into disarray. Isolated units fought hard to beat off frontal attacks in Thorvald’s sector outside Krakow. Finally his assignment came from Command: his eight-man sniper squad was to creep up during lulls in the fighting and shoot into the Polish trenches and strongholds. Command wanted its snipers to drain the enemy’s fighting spirit.

For four days Thorvald and his men crawled at dawn to within five hundred meters of the enemy. Thorvald collected seventy-one confirmed kills, more than the rest of his unit combined.

While the other snipers bragged at the evening meals and compared journals, Thorvald read books. The commander of his division came around and handed out tin tokens, one for each kill. These were to be redeemable at the end of the war for one hundred deutsche marks apiece, the army’s equivalent of a bounty. Thorvald gave his tokens away.

During the invasion’s second week, Thorvald’s company encircled a large Polish force. One morning at dawn, he looked out of his shooting cell at the sound of trumpets and pounding hooves. He watched in disbelief as a brigade of Polish cavalry leaped over the parapets and galloped across the open plain. Through his scope, he gazed at the colorful mounted soldiers, their gloved hands holding pennants and lances high, trying to rally their comrades.

He lined up his first target at six hundred meters and fired. The rider fell. Before he could acquire a second mark, the booming of tanks erupted behind him, raising columns of dirt and flame on the plain. He watched through the crosshairs; in minutes the magnificent Polish cavalry charge became a scattered collage of dismembered men and horses.

“And what,” he asked the assembled class at the end of this day’s tale, “do you think is the moral?”

Thorvald smiled at the young men. No hands went up. They knew better than to speak during his stories, even to answer a question.

They are so ready, Thorvald thought, looking at the faces, the ease of confidence in their movements, the juice of youth in their veins; they’re tugging at the reins to go off to battle to earn their own reputations, to move their crosshairs over the hearts of real men. I know how a man can kill. But I wonder how he can be so anxious to risk his life to go and do it.

“The lesson, my young, ignorant boys,” he said, holding his hands out to them as if to show the breadth of his sizable wisdom, “is this: don’t be a hero, on horseback or otherwise. Stay behind cover.”

TWO

MINUTES AFTER HOFSTETTER’S BODY HAD BEEN carried to the rear, orders came for Nikki’s company to move from their position west of the Tractor Factory. The final assault on the next factory, the Barricades, was under way. This offensive would be the knockout punch; it should take just one or two more weeks to push the Reds out of the Barricades and into the Volga.

Captain Mercker split the eighty-man company into patrols of ten. Mercker was leery of snipers and migrating machine guns that might carve into his troops and bog them down in a firefight if they moved as one. He counted out the first ten men.

“Corporal.” He pointed at Nikki. “You know our objective?”

Nikki nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”

“You’re in charge of the first squad. Get to within fifteen hundred meters of the Barricades. Find a secure spot for the company to assemble.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep your head down. Move.”

Nikki looked at the nine men assigned to scurry behind him through the gauntlet ahead. All young, pale, grimy faces like his own. All interchangeable, he thought, each one dispensable, like a throw-away rag. He said a quick and silent prayer that there would still be nine when he next counted.

“Go only where I go,” he said. “Move only how I move.”

Nikki bent at the waist and knees. His rifle hung in his hand almost to the ground. He stretched his neck like a tortoise and lifted his head. In this position, which was torturous but made a man as small a target as he could be when running, Nikki moved clear of cover and into the open street.

He ran in bursts, shadowing the contours of the buildings and rubble. His nine charges mimicked his every step. They ducked and waited one at a time behind the debris he chose. They lay panting for breath in the craters and ditches where he had lain. Nikki picked each position with care, knowing that every step he took had to be taken nine more times. He never allowed himself to be without cover for more than ten meters. In that space, a sniper would have to be extraordinarily good or lucky to line him up and hit. If he ran into the sights of a Red machine gun, he might still have time to dive for the ground and scramble behind something, anything. His biggest concern was his nerves; he knew that if he made a mistake, it might kill not him but perhaps the fifth or last soldier behind him.

Twice, rifle shots rang out. Nikki froze. The shots did not find his men and were not followed by more action. They were just the random convulsions of combat in Stalingrad, as if too much silence broke some unwritten rule. He caught his breath, then pressed on.

Nikki had the objective in sight for a long time. The three gargantuan factories stood in a line, their backs against the river—the Tractor Works, the Barricades, and the Red October. Around them for a kilometer in all directions lay open battleground plowed by bombs, the broken machinery of war scattered over it like coal shoveled across a floor. At fifteen hundred meters from the middle factory, the Barricades, Nikki sprinted across the remains of a wide boulevard and tumbled into an abandoned trench. He waved to his men to gather beside him and wait for the rest of the company.

After the grueling three-hour, six-kilometer traverse through the city, Nikki’s reward was nine sweaty faces, their eyes rolling as if to say, Corporal, don’t make us do that ever again.

The Barricades, like the other two factories, had been gutted and dismantled by battle to where it had fallen in on itself. A row of broken smokestacks rose above the giant heaps of steel. From this distance, the factory looked deserted. Nikki knew it was not.

To his left were the ghostly shambles of several stone buildings. The corner structure was the largest. Its top was missing, crumpled at its feet like a skirt that had been dropped. That building will make an excellent strong point, Nikki thought. We can occupy several floors and control the approaches from all sides.

The squad waited in the trench for the rest of the company to arrive. Nikki wondered about Lieutenant Hofstetter’s body.

Where is it now, six hours after being alive for its last moments? Is it being readied to fly home, boxed in pine for a military funeral with flags and honors like we’ve all been promised? Or has it been dumped into an unmarked grave in the Russian sod with a hundred other corpses? Did his arms and legs fly akimbo when he landed atop the other dead, to stay that way into eternity, sliding down the pile, going to Judgment upside down?

I don’t want to die like Hofstetter, a bullet in the brain fired from half a kilometer away blasting out the back of my head. He was just drinking from a canteen, he wasn’t even fighting; he didn’t get the chance to die thrashing or screaming to give his life some sort of send-off, a final moment of note. Drinking out of a canteen: he didn’t know he was marked with the crosshairs of a sniper, a damned killer who crawled away with no blood on his hands.

I don’t want to die like that, branded with an invisible black cross like one of war’s ten million cattle. It isn’t a proper death for a soldier; it’s just an ending. It’s even a bit stupid, a silly, facedown, ripped-open, awful ending.

I don’t want to be buried in Russia, Nikki thought. I want to go home.

In ten minutes the first soldier from the second patrol appeared in the ruins to the rear. Nikki’s men beckoned him into their trench. For two hours, the afternoon sun lowered its gaze and the rest of the company assembled. Captain Mercker arrived at dusk with the last group of ten. There had been no encounters with the enemy. The Russians must be withdrawing, Nikki guessed, to concentrate in the factories and ready themselves for the coming German hammer blow.

Mercker held a quick meeting with his lieutenant and five sergeants and corporals.

“We’re going to take this big building on the corner, gentlemen. I want the men to move in their ten-man squads. Corporal,” Mercker said, locking on Nikki, “you go in first again. You seem to be good at it.”

Nikki nodded. A hell of a thing to be good at, he thought.

“Send word when the building is secure. If we hear action, we’ll come running.”

“Yes, sir.” Nikki collected his squad.

Nikki led the way for his men, ducking and weaving. Bursting in the front door, his squad moved quickly down a long, dark corridor with machine guns poised and grenades ready. They scraped their backs against the walls before erupting into rooms. Every nerve was raw while they scoured the shadows for any sign of Russians. Nikki shouldered the last door. It opened into a large assembly hall, perhaps a ballroom. He sent a private to tell Mercker to come ahead. He suggested the large room at the end of the hall as the place where the unit should gather and spread out to fortify the building.

Once all eighty men were assembled, the captain ran down assignments. Spotters, large-caliber machine guns, and mortars would go to the top floor. Antitank gunners were sent to the middle floors to shoot down onto Russian tanks. For street-level defense, light machine guns and the rest of the men would be on the ground floor. Mess and communications were in the big hall.

Nikki stood beside the door to the hallway. At Mercker’s signal, every man in the unit was to dash to his assigned position. Nikki prepared to fling the door open, plant his feet, and aim his machine gun down the hall to protect the men scurrying up the steps.

“Ready?” asked the captain. “Go.”

Nikki flung open the door.

A grenade sailed past his face. On the other side of the hall a door slammed shut.

Nikki screamed, “Down!”

He flung himself to the floor. The grenade rolled into the crowd and exploded ten meters from where he lay. The blast was muffled. Nikki brought his head up from his arms to see the jerking body of a soldier who’d leaped onto the grenade.

Men recoiled from the door. Every weapon they could handle was pointed forward while they backpedaled. Chambers clattered as rounds were slammed into firing position. Eighty fingers poised on triggers as the boom of the detonation faded. Near the door, alone, the body of the dead heroic soldier lay smoking.

“Russians!” a voice shouted. “Goddammed Russians are across the hall!”

“How’d they get in there?” Mercker was furious. “Damn it, how? I thought we checked this floor!”

The captain stabbed his finger at six men; Nikki was the sixth. Mercker waved them beside the door, then made a fist, his battle signal for them to stand guard.

Nikki rushed forward with the other men. He sat quickly and hoisted his machine gun stock to his cheek. He aimed at the doorknob of the door across the hall. If it moves, he thought, I’m blowing it off its hinges. Another soldier slid along the wall and slammed their door shut.

The captain ordered two heavy machine guns set up and aimed at the doorway in case the Russians mounted a charge. Guards were placed at the three windows into the room. The Reds might try crawling around the side of the building to toss in satchel charges. Secure for the moment, the captain stepped to the center of the room.

“We’re ordered to hold this building,” he growled, “and that’s what we’re going to do. I don’t know the strength across the hall, so we’ll keep our position until we have more info. Or until we find a way to get the Reds out of here.”

A soldier spoke up. “Why don’t we just rush them, sir? There can’t be more than a few.”

“How do you know that, Private? There are eighty Germans in here. Would you like to hold us off with just a few? I don’t think the Russians would, either. I doubt that’s all they brought with them.”

Nikki looked at the grimy faces leaning into the officer’s words.

“No,” Mercker said, “I’m not ready to turn this into a slaughterhouse. We’ll wait them out. See who gets scared first. Probably they’ll sneak out a window tonight and go report that the Reich has got this building now.”

Nikki moved to the center of the room and sat. He watched two men lift the martyred soldier out of his smoldering blood and carry him to a window. It was Private Kronnenberg. A boy his own age, nineteen or twenty. They’d spoken only a few times. Kronnenberg was new, just called up. He’d been hopeful, still certain that Germany needed Russian soil. A young patriot. He was no longer young, Nikki thought. Kronnenberg was dead. He couldn’t get any older than that. He was lowered out the window gently.

Nikki’s eyes fixed on the door. The Russians are just like us, he thought. There’s a hundred of them. They’re huddled in the middle of a big room. They’re making plans to spend the night, too, figuring we’ll creep out through the windows as soon as we’re sure we don’t want to die enough to keep this building.

Nikki was scared. He marveled that he could still be afraid for his life. When would the fear leave him completely? When would he have seen enough, run and crawled enough? He didn’t shake after the battles in these buildings anymore. He no longer curled up in a corner under the clearing smoke, looking breathlessly at the dead of both armies. No longer. This was a bad sign. He didn’t want to get used to this. But it was happening.

THREE

“COMRADE CHIEF MASTER SERGEANT. COME IN. SIT down.”

Zaitsev stepped down onto the dirt floor of Colonel Nikolai Batyuk’s bunker. Batyuk stood and motioned to a keg as a stool. The commander of the 284th Division was taller than Zaitsev but just as slim. His dark hair was combed back to show a high, pale forehead.

Batyuk’s desk was a collection of planks laid over two barrels. Unlike the bunker Zaitsev shared with Viktor, this cave had been dug not by a German bomb but by sappers into the limestone cliff above the Volga, southeast of the Barricades plant. The walls and roof were fortified with timbers, recalling a Siberian sauna. Behind Batyuk, two women worked field radios, plugging and unplugging wires at a furious rate and speaking into microphones in low tones. Three staff officers leaned over another crude table to scribble lines on a map.

Zaitsev perched on the keg. He set his pack at his feet and rested his sniper rifle across his knees.

“You wished to see me, Comrade Colonel?”

“Yes, Vasily. You were stationed in Vladivostok before you were transferred here. You were in the navy. A clerk?”

“Yes, sir.” I am not, Zaitsev thought, still a clerk.

Batyuk pointed to Zaitsev’s neck. “I see you still wear your sailor’s shirt under your tunic.”

Zaitsev tugged at the blue-and-white striped jersey beneath his outer shirt.

“Yes, sir. In the navy we say the blue is the ocean’s waters and the white is the foam.”

Batyuk smiled. “I’ve never seen the Pacific. I hear it’s beautiful. Perhaps one day.”

The two sat silently. Both wore thin, faraway smiles across their faces. Batyuk blinked and cleared his throat.

“Let me see your sniper journal.”

Zaitsev handed the black leather booklet across the desk.

The colonel flipped through the pages. Without looking up, he said, “As you know, in the last two weeks the Germans have kicked us out of the Tractor Factory in all but the northeast corner. They’re also threatening our positions in the Barricades and Red October plants.”

Batyuk laid the journal on the desk. “Our bridgehead is dwindling. I’m going to tell you a few things you may not know. Then again, since you’re one of the men who makes those lines on that map come and go”—he motioned to his staffers drawing and erasing at their table— “you might know a great deal.”

Zaitsev looked hard at his colonel. Batyuk reached under the desk and produced a bottle of vodka and two glasses. He poured.

The two raised their drinks in toast. They gulped, then inhaled deeply through their shirtsleeves, the Russian ritual to make the sting of the vodka last a moment longer.

Batyuk exhaled. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you any cabbage.”

Zaitsev smiled. “Another time, Comrade Colonel.”

Batyuk leaned across his desk. “Something’s up. I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’ve had our ammunition cut every day for a week. That means it’s being diverted somewhere else.” The colonel picked up a penknife and tapped it in his palm. “We have to hold out, Vasily. We’ve got to keep the Germans’ feet to the fire. I can’t tell you why, because I don’t know why. But something very big is up.”

Batyuk motioned Zaitsev to follow him to the map table. He indicated the row of three giant factories, red and black lines mingled in a tangle of battle activity. Zaitsev thought how little the lines told of the destruction and terror inside those buildings.

“We have forty thousand men in place,” Batyuk began. “We can stay at that level so long as we continue to get reinforcements. Whenever the Germans reduce our bridgehead, we just pack the men in more densely. Even though our positions are getting smaller, they’re not getting weaker. The Germans have been slow to catch on to this. In fact, Zhukov and the rest of the generals who know what’s going on aren’t concerned with space. If we can keep that number of men fighting somewhere in the city, the Nazis can’t pull out. Hitler won’t let them. He’s already announced to the world he controls Stalingrad. I think Hitler’s just mad because the city is named after Stalin.” Batyuk chuckled. “Who knows. Anyway, as long as they can’t leave, you and I are doing our jobs.”

The colonel moved his hand to an open area between the city center and the factory district. His finger came to rest over a black circle. “This is Hill 102.8,” he said, referring to the hill’s height in meters above sea level. Its real name was Mamayev Kurgan, the burial mound of Mamay, an ancient Tatar king. “The Germans control this hill. From here they can see every damned thing going on… here.” Batyuk drew a ring around the city center. “Here…” He motioned to a five-kilometer stretch of the ruins of three huge factories: on the eve of war, these plants had produced 40 percent of the Soviet Union’s tractors and 30 percent of its high-grade steel; the bombings of August and September had reduced them to gargantuan tangles of steel, twisted rails, and forlorn brick facades.

“And worst of all, here.” Batyuk stabbed his finger three times along the Volga at the landing stages: the Skudri crossing, behind the Tractor Factory; Crossing No. 62, at the rear of the Barricades; and the moorings south of the Banny Gully, directly across from Krasnaya Sloboda, the Red Army’s main embarkation point on the east bank.

“From 102.8, German spotters are directing artillery and air strikes against our supplies and reinforcements on the river.” Batyuk moved back to his desk. “With supplies already being cut, we could be in serious trouble if we don’t maximize use of what we do get from the east bank.”

Zaitsev sat again on the keg. “Do you want me to hunt on Mamayev Kurgan? I know it pretty well.”

Batyuk waved his hand. “Not yet.” He opened Zaitsev’s sniper journal to the first page. “Tell me about your introduction to being a sniper.”

Zaitsev had seen his first snipers during the battle for the Tractor Factory only eighteen days before, two lithe men crawling in the direction of the bullets while others dug their way to cover. Zaitsev had admired their courage, how well they seemed to work on their own.

“Do you like working on your own?” Batyuk inquired.

“I am not unaccustomed to it. It’s how I hunt.”

“Who commissioned you a sniper? When did it happen?”

“On October eighth. We were in a shop of the Tractor Factory, pinned down under a machine gun. I don’t know—I just crawled to a spot, aimed, and fired.”

“Distance?”

“One hundred and seventy-five meters.”

“You took out the machine gunner?”

“Yes.”

“And you shot the next two Nazis who got behind the gun.”

“I did.” Zaitsev was surprised Batyuk knew this.

“Lieutenant Deriabyn approached you and told you to report to the sniper unit of my division, yes? You, along with your Siberian friend Viktor Medvedev—another crack shot, I hear—began as snipers with your telescopic sights the next day.”

Zaitsev nodded. Batyuk was not inviting comment.

“What kind of training did you get?”

Zaitsev said nothing.

“Hmmm?” Batyuk took up the penknife. He tapped it on the table. It said, quietly, Answer me, Chief Master Sergeant.

Zaitsev’s first days as a freshman sniper had been marked by a funereal silence. The nine other snipers in the squad did not speak often. No one seemed sure how long any of them would live. Camaraderie did not exist. The snipers were fresh-scrubbed boys and weasel-eyed men, long-limbed athletes and stocky pugs, all volunteers. They had been recommended for sniper duty by their platoon commanders, each for his ability to kill one target at a time from a distance. It seemed they were all resolute to survive the same way, one at a time, alone, at a distance.

The unit lived in a dirt cave, a bunker dug by a heavy artillery round and then covered with rafters and debris to disguise it from Nazi dive-bombers. At night, when Zaitsev and Viktor returned to the snipers’ bunker, they alone talked by the glow of the lantern of strategies and their similar childhoods in the Urals. They spoke of hunting the enemy in Stalingrad as if the Nazis were animals in the wild, driven by instinct more than intellect. War, they agreed, scoured away man’s humanness to reveal the beast inside. The beast was what Zaitsev and Viktor tracked and killed.

There was neither structure nor training in place for the snipers; experience was their teacher, the battle gave them their orders. Some of the men were sullen; others shone brightly, ready to prove their worth. Many had strength; others had patience; some had brains. Few combined all three, and Zaitsev and Viktor watched the faces come and go, disappearing into the giant meat grinder of war in the decimated streets, cellars, rusted metal, and pockmarked walls.

“None, sir,” Zaitsev answered. “No training.”

Batyuk turned back to the opening page in the journal. “Tell me about your first sniper kill.” He found a place on the page with his finger. “October eighth. You had two kills near the railway behind the chemical factory.”

On Zaitsev’s initial dawn as a sniper, he’d spotted an enemy unit digging a trench to connect two shattered rail cars. That evening he’d asked the sniper squad’s leader, a corporal, for permission to return and hunt them. Since he was a chief master sergeant, the rank he brought with him from his years as a naval clerk, and the highest-ranking soldier in the bunker, he was told to do what he wanted. Before dawn, he and Viktor crawled out to take up positions three hundred meters from the trench.

Zaitsev and Viktor watched the Nazis through binoculars under the rising sun. The two snipers let the Germans show themselves above the trench a few times to give them confidence that the area was secure. They would wait for one of the digging soldiers to finish his labor and thrust the shovel into the dirt or lean on it. That would be the time for a chest shot.

“Why in the chest?” Batyuk interrupted.

A chest shot, Zaitsev explained, would more likely cause the target to drop the shovel and leave it on top of the breastwork when he fell. A shot in the back would increase the odds of him taking the shovel back down into the trench. Just as planned, the first soldier to die— with Medvedev’s bullet in his heart—let the shovel fly from his grasp before he tumbled backward into the trench. Viktor and Zaitsev trained their sights on the tool left lying in full view. In minutes a head and an arm appeared above the dirt wall to retrieve it.

Viktor whispered, “You.”

Zaitsev’s bullet pierced the Nazi’s cheek.

“Where did you learn this tactic?” Batyuk sat forward, his fingers playing under his chin.

“It’s a simple ploy for a hunter from the Urals, sir. Wolves and other animals in the taiga mate for life. You bait one with the body of the other.”

Batyuk opened his hands. “Ah, yes, of course. In Siberia. I fear we’re out of wolves in my home, the Ukraine.” He turned more pages in the journal. “And this one? Last week you were on the southern slope of Mamayev Kurgan, hunting enemy snipers.” Batyuk held the book closer to his eyes. “What is the ‘mortar shell trick’?”

Again Zaitsev explained to his colonel. He’d picked up this ploy from a German sniper who’d feasted on Russian wounded during their evacuation through a ravine near Mamayev Kurgan. Zaitsev had crawled to a position high above the ravine. He lay behind cover for hours, watching with his artillery periscope. The periscope was an excellent tool, allowing him to stay out of sight and observe a wide range at four power, the same as his sniper scope. It was precise to 250 meters. Looking near the crest of the hill, Zaitsev saw a heap of empty brass mortar shells. He counted twenty-three shells. He noted that one among the pile had no bottom.

“You counted the shells?” Batyuk tapped his pocketknife in his palm. “I marvel at your attention to detail. That’s fantastic.”

“Not really, sir. Noticing details is a more important skill than shooting for distance. Movements in the terrain, even the smallest shift in a rock or a new hole in a wall, are the only clues you may get to the location of a sniper. These are the tracks we read, just like footprints in the snow or animal scat on the forest floor.”

Batyuk nodded. Zaitsev knew he was telling his colonel things the man did not, could not, know. Oh, well, he thought, Batyuk asked me. What can I do but tell him? Zaitsev reminded himself to try not to boast. You’re just a hunter, hunting. It’s what you do well. Let it speak for itself.

“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.

In the summer of 1927, Andrei took twelve-year-old Vasha to hunt a wolf that was preying on their cows. Several kilometers from home, in a copse of trees, the wolf sprang at them. Andrei whirled and killed it with the sharpened end of his walking staff. This, said Andrei, ramming the spear again into the shuddering wolf s heart, was a lesson in courage for the boy. Never forget how easy it is to kill. Never be afraid to kill when you must. Andrei wiped a warm streak of blood across the boy’s cheek. He watched Vasha skin the wolf. Then he presented his grandson with the old rifle he carried. On his way back to the village, Vasha shot two hares and a wild goat. He was a hunter now, with his own gun and three hides he could throw on the pile at the hunters’ lodge.

Vasha often spent more time in the forest than with people. Sometimes he smeared bear fat over his body and gun to hide his scent; often his mother refused to let him in the house because of the smell. On these evenings he slept gladly with his dogs.

Grandmother Dunia taught him to read and write. Zaitsev believed it was his babushka’s breadth of spirit and broad-hipped will that held his family together. His sisters, parents, cousins, and even the dogs obeyed her smartly swung birch switch with only the occasional grumble.

Dunia was a spiritual old woman. She fought with Andrei over God, determined to keep religious holidays in her home. Though Andrei did not accept Duma’s saints, he would not insult them, perhaps in deference to Dunia’s God or more likely the whip of her stick.

Once, Zaitsev asked his grandfather about his beliefs.

“Grandmother says the soul leaves the body and goes to heaven after we die, Grandpapa. Is that true for animals, too?”

Andrei cuffed him on the side of the head. “Neither man nor beast lives twice,” he snorted. “Come here.”

The old man walked Vasha to a side of venison hanging in the smokehouse. “This dawn, you killed that animal.” He pointed with a hand sharp as his spear. “If I see you killing it again, I’ll shoot you!”

The old man motioned outside to the deerskin tacked to the side of the shed. “The hide is drying. The flesh is on the table, and the guts we throw to the dogs. Remember, Vasha, soul is shit. God is about fear, a way to make you afraid and obey. The man of the forest is without fear.”

The family’s interest in Vasily’s hunting exploits gradually waned. On his fourteenth birthday he returned in the morning with several wolf and lynx hides strapped to his back. He received no notice. That evening Andrei told him to always come back to the village from a good hunt before dawn or at night so that no one would see the number and quality of hides he brought home. Pride is good in a hunter, Andrei explained, but boastfulness is not. Vasily knew he was now considered an adult. He was expected to perform like a man of the taiga. Now his rewards were a glass of vodka, some peace and quiet from his sisters, perhaps even some respect, and a seat in the men’s place, the hunters’ lodge.

At sixteen Vasily was sent three hundred kilometers away to Magnitogorsk to attend technical school at Russia’s largest ore processing plant. In the workers’ settlement he finished primary school and began bookkeeping courses. Numbers came easily to him. In his free time he hunted in the hills around town.

After six years learning the trade of a clerk and another five years filing papers in the navy, the twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant Vasily Zaitsev wanted to fight Germans. The Nazis had invaded Russia. Japan would keep.

Hitler had taken the city of Rostov in a bloody July campaign to cauterize his right flank on his thrust to the Caucasus. Before the Germans could continue south, their left flank also had to be secured. In the middle of that flank stood the manufacturing center of Stalingrad on a bend of the Volga.

A fierce battle was shaping up on the steppe west of the city. Throughout the summer the Red Army lumbered out to meet the Germans to fight intense tank battles across immense fields and steep ravines. At first the Russians proved no match for the rolling blitzkrieg. They retreated east over the Don River to lick their wounds. On the land bridge between the Don and Volga Rivers, the Red Army regrouped.

In the first week of September 1942, Zaitsev and two hundred other Siberian sailors in Vladivostok were mustered as marines into the 284th Rifle Division of the Sixty-second Army. They were assigned to the western front and the battle that Winston Churchill called “the hinge of fate.”

They were sent to Stalingrad.

THE TRAIN CLATTERED DAY AND NIGHT, RESTING ONLY in the afternoons to take on fuel and food. The villages where they stopped seemed asleep, moving at the heavy pace of age, of exhaustion. Children chased through the alleys playing army, ducks-on-the-pond, or October revolution, but even their laughter did not enliven the pall over the tile rooftops and dull, smokeless mills. There were no young men left in the towns. They were all gone to war.

The townspeople approached the halted troop train, tears welling in their eyes, hands lifted with bread, vegetables, vodka, clothes, and photos of Stalin and Lenin. The fleshy girls handed up letters to the uniformed arms reaching from the windows; the envelopes were often addressed to “Brave Young Man.”

On the fifth day the train stopped in a treeless vista of quivering wheat. The sailors set up tents. They were addressed by Batyuk and ordered to spend three more days on the steppe preparing for battle while waiting for the trucks to carry them onward.

Dusk settled over the flat, featureless land; a trembling orb of orange appeared low in the western sky. Silence blew like a fog through the men. Standing beside the train and their tents, one by one, they held up hands to quiet each other and listen. In the gloaming, a barely audible boom and howl came from the flashing dome of light in the west, its source still well below the horizon. Zaitsev heard the sailors around him, and himself, breathe the word: Stalingrad.

For three days and nights the company practiced street-fighting skills. The men learned to crawl and run, to kill with bayonets and rifles, knives, shovels, and fists. Grenades with pins pulled to make them live were tossed and caught, then thrown into trenches to explode. Straw dummies were sliced or blown open, and many real noses were bloodied.

The morning of September 20, a dust plume rose out on the dirt road. A staff car came and stopped beside the train. Out stepped Division Commander Konstantinovich Zhukov. He’d ridden from Stalingrad to watch the sailors of the 284th pursue their drills.

The men threw themselves into their training, putting on their most ferocious show for the general. During a hand-to-hand exercise, one of the sailors tripped over his bell-bottom trouser legs. Zhukov slapped his thigh to stop the action.

“Why aren’t you men in army uniforms?” he demanded.

Lieutenant Bolshoshapov stepped forward and came to attention.

“Commander, we are sailors and are proud to fight as sailors.” Bolshoshapov shouted the words over Zhukov’s head.

“Have you been issued your army uniforms, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Change into them immediately. These damned things,” Zhukov said pointing at the billowing pants legs, “will get you killed. Where is your navy discipline?”

Zhukov whirled to return to his staff car. Bolshoshapov called out, “Commander, sir. With your permission, we would like to remain in our navy shirts under our uniforms.”

Zhukov turned back and saluted Bolshoshapov.

“On behalf of the Red Army and the Party, I gladly consent. Of course, sailor. And fight bravely in your navy shirts.”

The Siberians let out a cheer and stripped down to their skivvies and striped navy shirts. Orderlies ran to the train to fetch the drab green uniforms of the Soviet army.

That evening dozens of American Studebaker trucks arrived to ferry the division to the Volga. For two hours the men bumped down the road in the open backs of the lorries. Every soldier watched the spreading glow in the west. The distant thumps of explosions swelled in their ears while the horizon rolled to them.

The trucks stopped on the threshold of a forest, and the thousand-plus men of the 284th lined up on a path that disappeared into a thick stand of poplars. The soldiers marched two by two, burdened with rifles and packs. Zaitsev resisted the urge to look up through the leaves into the flaring sky. He focused instead on the back of the man in front of him. As he walked under the canopy of trees the sounds and lights grew muffled, as if the forest, ever his friend, were soothing him and his company, quieting the conflict for their restive ears.

Along the road, posters and slogans were nailed to the poplar trunks. If you don’t stop the enemy in Stalingrad, he will enter your home and destroy your village! one read. The enemy must be crushed and destroyed at Stalingrad! and Soldier, your country will not forget your courage!

Three kilometers into the forest, the march was stopped. Batyuk ordered the men off the path to darken their faces and hands with grease and dirt. While they handed around the greasepaint pots, a hundred wounded soldiers shuffled past on the road away from the battle.

Every one of the bandaged and bloodied soldiers held on to another; the able-legged helped others limp along, the sighted led the blind. Those who had both hands carried stretchers. It seemed the searing heat of battle had melded these men together, so they moved and bled as one giant mangled creature.

The Siberians gaped at the marching soldiers’ misery. They spotted a sailor among the wounded, still in his bell-bottoms. They beckoned him to the side of the road, where he saw the navy shirts showing at their necks beneath their Red Army tunics.

“Comrade sailor! Come, sit down!” they called.

The sailor, grimacing in pain, stepped off the path and was seated on a backpack. Several hands stretched out with cigarettes and matches. The weary man accepted a smoke. He asked to have it lit and held up his right arm. It was cut short, without a hand.

A flask of vodka shot from the crowd.

The sailor dragged heavily on the cigarette. He looked up into the camouflaged faces around him.

“Na zdorovye,” he said, and threw back a large gulp. Then he held up his truncated arm. “Don’t worry about this. I sold it for a very high price.” He looked at the heads around him. “Where are you from?”

“We’re Siberians. We’ve come a long way to fight.”

The man blinked. “So have the Germans.”

His head sank to his chest. Hands shot out to catch him as if he might collapse.

The sailor pulled himself to his feet. He turned to rejoin the shambling line of wounded. The men parted to let him through. They offered him more cigarettes.

The sailor passed Zaitsev and stopped to look into the broad Siberian face. He tapped himself on the chest with the fingers that clutched the cigarette. Glowing ashes tumbled down his torn navy shirt. He put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and pressed his thumb against Zaitsev’s chest.

“Do some killing.”

THE SIBERIANS EMERGED FROM THE TREES ON THE EAST bank of the Volga. Two kilometers away, on the far side of the river, they saw a volcanic city. Stalingrad, once home to half a million people, appeared now as if not a single person could be alive there.

The city was lit by a thousand fires. Above the limestone river cliffs, charred roofless walls stood along avenues clotted with smoking rubble. Red pillars of dust and brick erupted into the air. Buildings swayed and crumbled as if the quaking city were nothing but a jagged shell and something huge and determined below the ground was kicking its way to the surface.

Lying on the sand, staring at the firestorm across the black, oily Volga, Zaitsev thought of his babushka Dunia’s descriptions of the underworld. A gust blew warm against his cheek. It carried the heat and carbon smell of a furnace. How can men be fighting in that perdition? he wondered.

Captain Ion Lebedev, a political commissar, settled in the sand next to him.

“Are you ready, Comrade Chief Master Sergeant?” he asked.

Zaitsev looked at the zampolit. The man’s black eyes flickered red. His face was split by a gap-toothed smile.

Zaitsev asked, “Has anyone actually said, ‘No, I am not ready,’ Comrade Lebedev?”

“We have two hundred men on this shore. A few need prodding to enter that.” Lebedev jutted his nose at the blazing city.

Zaitsev held no love for the commissars. He’d been subjected to their speeches, their “prodding,” for weeks. He’d listened with less than rapt attention for hours without end, it seemed—on the train, on the steppe, and now, here, in the sand on the cusp of battle. He did not need simple advice on courage, did not like feeling he wasn’t trusted to fight well and die for the Rodina. Zaitsev had been a good Komsomol member and hoped to become a member of the Communist Party. But the Germans had not invaded the Party. Their strike was at Russia. It was for the Motherland he would fight.

Many of the men feared Lebedev and the other politrooks, and with good reason. Stalin had given these political officers—all loyal idealists—the fiat to maintain the order of the Party throughout the army, from the highest general to the newest private. Their power came from Stalin’s Order No. 227, called the “Iron Hand Rule.” Not only had Stalin charged the commissars with keeping the Red soldiers politically focused during battle, even during the worst of it, they were also to judge on the field of battle each man’s performance. The commissars shared responsibility with the Soviet officers for the troops’ dedication to fighting until the last vessel of blood was emptied. If a man showed himself reluctant to fight, the commissar was to support, encourage, exhort, even threaten. But if a soldier displayed cowardice or retreated without orders, the politrook was to act with an iron hand. Zaitsev, like the rest of the men, knew that, too often, the “iron hand” meant a loaded pistol held to your head. Lebedev handed a scrap of newspaper to Zaitsev. “This was printed in Pravda last week. I show it to you, tovarich, because the men look up to you. They will follow you.”

“We’re Siberians, comrade commissar. We’ll all fight without articles from Pravda.”

Lebedev put his palm on Zaitsev’s shoulder. He shook it once gently and smiled with his gap.

“Read. We have some time before we cross.” The article was entitled “They Know at Home How You Are Fighting.” Zaitsev squinted to read in the shifting light:

Zaitsev returned the sheet to Lebedev. “Thank you, comrade commissar. It takes courage to be so direct.”

Lebedev patted Zaitsev again on the shoulder. “Yes, it does. I’ll see you on the other side, Comrade Chief Master Sergeant.”

Well past midnight, the Siberians lay on the beach, watching and listening to Stalingrad scream to them. A flotilla of battered fishing boats, barges, steamers, and tugs appeared. A barge dropped anchor in the shallows in front of them. Zaitsev saw the holes in the ship’s timbers. Two men forward and four aft bailed buckets of water over the gunwales as fast as they could. Supplies were loaded quickly into the barge’s hold. Wooden crates of ammo were shouldered up the plank and lowered belowdecks. Several dozen cardboard boxes were stored; from them came the friendly sound of clanging, ringing vodka bottles. Crates of canned ham from America were carried up the gangway. The Red Army soldiers jokingly called this ham the “second front.” For a year Stalin had begged England and the United States to attack the Germans in the west to ease the pressure on Russia. The Allies always responded with their many reasons for being slow and considered in their actions. For the Russian foot soldier, these tins of sweet, wet, red ham from places such as Georgia and Virginia were to be the only help they would get from the States. The ham alone would have to suffice as the second front.

The boats chugged onto the Volga. Flares split the glittering night sky. The men stared overhead, trying to pierce the coils of smoke and search for the first hint of a diving Luftwaffe warplane. The dancing light from the city scorched like a fever across their brows, making them blink and sweat.

Halfway across the river a Stuka whistled past. The men braced, but no bombs or bullets fell. The fighter banked hard and climbed to avoid flying over the flames of the city. The men waited; was there another plane behind this one? When the Stuka was not followed, they let out a sigh as if from a single giant bellows.

The leaking flotilla pushed to the central landing stage. No more aircraft shot out of the night. Zaitsev read the Luftwaffe’s neglect to attack the reinforcements to be a bad sign; it showed the Germans’ confidence in their taking of the city.

Ashore, the company huddled against the cool limestone cliffs. Above them, the city teetered and crackled. The river lapped at the stones under their feet, murmuring of tranquility in the darkness, telling the soldiers a thin lie of calm and peace.

With the dawn came a renewed spirit; none of the men was willing to be seen with fear staining his face. Each set his jaw and shoulders for action. The bravado in their voices climbed with the sun and the sounds of battle filtering down from the cliffs.

A sooty runner delivered orders to Lieutenant Bolshoshapov. The Siberians were to move three kilometers north along the river to reinforce another company pinned down at the Lazur chemical plant. Their landmark would be a bank of crumpled fuel tanks.

After a half hour of jogging over the sand, Bolshoshapov spotted the fuel tanks overhead. The pop of gunfire, punctuated by the thump of grenades, leaped over the cliff. The Siberians clambered up the slope and took positions in the rubble. Two hundred meters away a Russian company hunkered down under fire from mortars and machine guns.

Zaitsev’s unit moved up on the German right flank. The Nazis, surprised by the reinforcements, deployed their machine guns to cover the new threat.

The Siberians drew fire, and for the first time Zaitsev heard the ripping hiss of bullets fired at him. This was the moment he’d waited for in a confusion of fear and eagerness. Here at last was the ultimate hunt. The rounds whizzing past whispered to him in the hushed voice of his grandfather kneeling beside him in the forest: Get moving, Vasha. Quick. Careful. Silent. Go.

Without waiting for orders, he slid through the rubble of the first fuel tank. He wanted to get an open shot before the enemy could scramble for cover from his angle.

At 150 meters Zaitsev opened up. He knocked down three machine gunners with his first three rounds. Once these guns were silenced, his company leaped from cover and charged the Germans, firing and shouting.

A whistling yowl dropped through the smoke. Before Zaitsev could move, an artillery shell exploded behind him in the middle of his mates, knocking men off their feet and dropping others onto their faces to burrow for cover. Zaitsev looked back and realized with alarm that one of the three fuel tanks, though badly dented, had somehow not been punctured during the previous bombings. His question whether it still contained fuel was answered by the next salvo.

The tank blew apart in a thunderous explosion, sending a fireball up and over the Siberians. Flaring fuel rained out of the mushroom cloud. Zaitsev’s clothes dripped with small, hungry flames.

He tore off his tunic, navy undershirt, pants, and ammo belt. His skin was singed, but his head was clear. He pounded on his crown to make sure his hair had not caught fire.

Around him, his friends lay dead. Their corpses were wrapped in sheets of smoke; yellow hornets of fire swarmed about their death poses. Through it all the Germans continued shooting.

Zaitsev fought down his horror. He stared across the smoldering battleground. The Germans had moved and were rearming their machine guns, swiveling their lines of fire. With his eyes moist from the smoke, he dropped and raised his rifle, drawing aim on a Nazi holding binoculars, perhaps an officer directing the attack. Zaitsev’s blackened hands shook; he could not wait for his pounding heart to let the gun sight settle in his hands. This might be his last clear shot before the Germans opened fire or called in more artillery.

He followed the swaying sight, squeezing for the shot he knew would serve only to give his position away. Suddenly he heard a cry of “Urrah! Urrah! Rodina!” Lieutenant Bolshoshapov leaped from behind a charred brick wall dressed only in his white underwear, ammo belt, and boots. He held his rifle over his head and charged, followed by waves of seminaked, smoking Siberians. Zaitsev stiffened, not believing his eyes. Without thinking, his legs lifted him from behind cover. He took a deep breath and screamed, “Urrah!’’ He pumped his rifle in the air and joined the charge.

He felt like a demon, running and firing into the maw of the Germans. The sight of themselves, fearless in their underwear and boots, guns blazing, drove him and his company into the Nazi line with a fierceness Zaitsev had never known. He felt exhilarated, bounding over debris, running and shooting. Closing in on the Nazi positions, his wrath grew so intense that, screaming, he crossed his eyes. He lost his balance and tripped over his running feet. Just as he hit the ground, the sailor before him was struck in the chest. The man’s arms flew open, his legs buckled in front of Zaitsev, and he skidded to his knees like a duck landing on water.

Looking over the body, Zaitsev saw the lieutenant and the men chase the Germans. The Nazis fled down an alley, firing over their shoulders.

One of the Red soldiers who’d been pinned down helped Zaitsev to his feet.

“You guys are crazy!” he laughed. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. In your underwear.”

Zaitsev touched his bloodied knee. “I tripped,” he murmured.

The soldier looked about at the many bodies on the ground. He patted Zaitsev on the back. “Go join your unit.”

The men walked to the spots where they had stripped off their burning uniforms. Each put back on whatever tatters he could retrieve of his scorched navy shirt.

The company settled in for the night. Fresh uniforms and food were delivered. Couriers brought with them the report of a comment made by Zhukov to Batyuk. The general had been amazed at how much the Siberian sailors seemed to dislike their new army uniforms. Apparently the commander had credited the company with burning the outfits off while still wearing them.

THE VIOLENCE OF THE LAST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER branded the lessons of house-to-house fighting into Zaitsev’s eyes. Before each attack, he crouched in a trench or a bunker, listening to the advice of veterans who’d survived in the city for a fierce month.

Often the battles for the buildings became hand-to-hand, the bludgeon as deadly as the bullet, the enemy’s breath and blood as close to Zaitsev as his own. For a large number of the Siberians, the three days’ training on the steppe had been worthless. During their first few days in battle, many of his friends had been killed taking unnecessary risks. But none had run away, and none had died without his weapon in his hands. The days lurched past. The bodies grew in grisly heaps under the smoking skies.

Zaitsev moved in the rubble with the grace and confidence of an animal. His taut frame and lean, muscled arms pulled him through the debris without rest, keeping enough in reserve to hold his rifle deadly still or whip a grenade almost as far as his big friend Viktor Medvedev. In hand-to-hand fighting, Zaitsev could be savage. His army knife, though bulkier than the skinning blades of his youth, slashed like a talon in his hand.

The Germans did not adjust well to the special tactics of street fighting. While the Reds captured strategic buildings with small platoons called “storm groups,” the Nazis simply threw more men into battle as if by pouring enough blood on a street they could win it. Sometimes during an attack, bodies piled so high in an alley that the corpses alone blocked the Nazis’ advance.

At the end of Zaitsev’s first two weeks in Stalingrad, the Germans had fought their way to the Volga in the city center to control the downtown area and the main landing stage of the Russians, Krasnaya Sloboda. By mid-October the Sixty-second Army had been cut in half, north and south.

The strongest Russian bridgehead was in the rubble of the factory district, five kilometers north of downtown. The Siberians were assigned to reinforce the Thirty-seventh Guards in defending the Tractor Factory, the northernmost of the three huge plants.

After a thirty-six-hour artillery barrage, the Germans attacked the Tractor Factory in the early hours of October fifth. Zaitsev, tunneling into the debris under a swarm of bullets, saw his first sniper team. The soldiers were small and thin, not powerful warriors at first glance. One man’s helmet was too big for him, covering his ears. He tipped it above his eyes to see where he was crawling. Both snipers carried rifles with scopes attached.

Even while Zaitsev’s unit dug deeper into the wreckage for cover, the snipers crept into the debris, like hunters, toward their prey.

FIVE

TANIA CHERNOVA STOOD ON THE SHORE WITH HER company, 150 soldiers from the 284th Division. In front of her a barge rolled gently at the dock in the black shallows.

Across the Volga, flames loomed and snapped. German fighter-bombers sprang from nighttime clouds, glowing red on their undersides from the fires raging below them. The planes dove to unleash their bombs at low altitudes. Their engines screamed, wings whistling to bank up and out, speeding the pilots away from the blasts and smoke.

Tania stared at the misery of the city. This was the heroic battleground of Stalingrad; its name was on the lips of every Russian. Stalin, the vozhd, the Supreme Leader, had made it clear: Stand and fight here at all costs in that apocalypse across the Volga.

Eleven women were in Tania’s company, each dressed in jackboots and uniforms without insignia. They did not have rifles; as radio operators or field nurses, they would not need weapons.

On the road to the river, Tania had marched past a hundred artillery pieces operated by women. She could have requested to join them, working the big guns and Katyushas, the fiery racks of missiles suspended on the beds of American Ford trucks. But Tania had spent the last year fighting with the Russian resistance in the forests of Byelorussia and outside Moscow. She’d left the partisans one month ago to come to Stalingrad and continue her vendetta against the Nazi “sticks.” She could not think of the Germans as human. They were pieces of wood, sticks. Men could not do what she had seen the Nazis do.

In the center of her group, a general with a shaved head was ending his speech. “The defenders of Stalingrad need help,” he cried, “to stave off the charging enemy. The Tractor Factory in the northern quarter of the city has come under heavy assault. Soldiers fighting in the factory and throughout Stalingrad are not taking a single step back. But their lives, and the life of Mother Russia, depend on fresh troops entering the battle.”

The general thrust his fist over his head. He shouted, “Urrah!” Tania and her group raised their fists and bellowed, “Urrah! Urrah!” The eyes around her darted from the cheering general to the blazing city. Fear, she thought; it shows first in the eyes.

The rickety barge at the dock had been loaded with supplies and awaited its human cargo. The general finished his speech. Guards herded the soldiers into line to board the boat.

Tania shouldered her backpack filled with cheeses, bread, and a bottle of vodka, all given to her by townspeople along the road. A short man with a thick, hard belly strode to the head of the line. He ran up the gangplank with surprising nimbleness, jumping over the gunwales onto the deck. Tania recognized him as a commissar, a Captain Danilov, who’d addressed the soldiers on the beach before the bald general’s lecture. He called the soldiers to join him, to “step into history.”

The first men boarded and sat on the deck. Two soldiers in the line in front of Tania, boys no more than eighteen, took a few steps, then froze in place. The other men ignored them, sliding past them in the line as if the two did not exist.

Tania came up behind them quickly. “Keep moving,” she said. “Don’t do this. They’re watching.”

Tania walked in front of the boys to face them. She saw their eyes fixed across the river at the inferno.

She shook one of them. “Move to the boat. Move!”

The young soldiers turned to Tania, then looked to each other. One licked his lips. An older soldier grabbed Tania’s arm to pull her away.

“They have their fates, comrade. We have ours. Come.”

Tanja let herself be tugged several steps, still looking back at the youths. She turned her head and marched in line.

After a few steps she heard Danilov scream from the deck of the barge.

“Stop! Stop immediately!”

All the soldiers halted and turned back toward the crowded landing. The boys had bolted out of line to run for the trees beyond the beach, dropping their rifles and ammo belts and shedding their packs to leap over barrels and cartons. Their quick footfalls, hard and hollow on the planks of the landing, mingled with the muffled roar from across the Volga. The dock grew silent while the two young cowards ran out their lives.

Tania heard their cries to each other, frantic and afraid. “Run! Oh, God! Keep running!”

Guards fired over the boys’ heads and yelled for them to halt and come back. The two ran.

Three more guards in greatcoats appeared from the trees at the edge of the sand. They hustled toward the boys, shooting.

One boy went down, wounded. The other stopped running. He turned, looked, and died where he stood. A guard walked to the wounded one, put his pistol to the boy’s forehead, and fired.

Tania and the soldiers resumed their march to the barge. The older soldier walked beside her.

“A waste,” she said to him.

He looked down at her. “Boys,” he said. “Boys the age of my children.”

Tania heaved her pack higher onto her shoulders. She moved away from him.

“Forget your children,” she said.

TANIA CHOSE A SPACE NEAR THE PORT RAIL. SHE SAT with her knees pulled up to her chest. Several men asked her to move to the safety of the middle of the deck. Tania tossed her shoulder-length hair and held her place.

The barge moved onto the river.

Three Stukas found the boat quickly. The crooked-wing fighters banked, buzzed high in triangle formation, and screamed down. Plumes of water erupted in the white light of phosphorus flares. Tania blinked at the geysers licking at the barge.

Along the rails, NKVD guards, known as “Green Hats,” stood with arms folded. A few had their hands inside their coats. Fingers on triggers, Tania thought, in case anyone gets a notion to jump overboard. Tania knew the Green Hats well, knew them to be the grimmest and most ruthless organ of the commissariat. She’d seen plenty of their work: they examined credentials and asked curt questions. Any soldier caught leaving the front without orders was dealt with swiftly. Hundreds of bodies had littered the road to Stalingrad, dreadful reminders to Red Army deserters to rethink their fears.

Another detonation sounded deep off the starboard rail. Shrapnel bit into the hull. Cold water soaked the soldiers on deck. No diving Stuka had shrieked before the explosion. That was a mortar shell, Tania thought. The big cannons are throwing in alongside the Luftwaffe. We’ve been spotted by the whole German army.

Water ran off the sides of the tilting decks. Commissar Danilov made a show of marching to the bow, swinging his boxlike torso and arms. He climbed onto the large stack of ammunition cartons where everyone could see him. He raised his arms over his head and pointed his hands straight up like antiaircraft guns into the noisy, deadly night.

“Fuck you!” he cried at the sky. “You fuckers of mothers. You whores!” Danilov scowled down at the soldiers. They were bunched together, wet on the trembling deck.

“Come on, you Russian heroes! Fuck those Germans up the ass! Come on! Let them hear you!”

A few voices rose. Then, like an engine catching and throttling to a roar, every one of the soldiers screamed out curses, exiling their fears into the night at the planes and flames and explosions of water and earth.

Tania thrust her fist in the air. “Bastards!” she screeched. “Murderers!”

While the troops spent their rage, Danilov called for the postman to come forward. “Mail call!” he shouted.

The postman handed up his canvas sack of letters. The commissar dug into the bag. Above the bedlam, he called out the names on the envelopes.

“Tagarin!”

“Here!”

“Antsiferov!”

“Over here!”

The postman took the letters from Danilov and scurried among the men. Twice he fell into their laps when the boat shifted on the roiling river.

Another tower of water reared off the port stern. A hand tapped Tania on the shoulder. Behind her sat the older soldier who’d pulled her away from the two deserters on the landing.

“Would you like some bread?” he asked.

“No, thank you. I have my own.”

“Please,” he insisted, “have some of mine.”

Tania looked at the cropped white beard and tanned face. The man’s blue eyes were set in the middle of deep, strong wrinkles like indigo marbles laid on straw.

“Of course,” she said, “but only if we share my cheese.”

They dug into their packs. A third, younger soldier reached out a half-full liter of vodka.

“Please,” he said, “may we have a picnic?”

The three began to exchange their food and drink. A shell exploded on the port side, closer than the last. Tania sheltered the bread from the spray.

The young one extended his hand. “My name is Fyodor Ivanovich Michailov. From Moscow.” He appeared to be eighteen or nineteen, a freshman. His face had a peculiar quality even in the flashing night— Tania couldn’t recall ever before seeing an entire face take part in a smile the way his did. His forehead, nose, chin, and eyes all crinkled at once. He shines, Tania thought quickly.

“I’m a writer,” he said, taking the cheese.

“What do you write about, Fedya?” the older soldier asked.

“Love stories. Poems.” He shrugged. “What can I write about? I’m Russian. My choices are love, government, or murder.”

“Write about Stalin and you’ll have all three.” The older man laughed alone. “Yuri Georgiovich Pankov.” He took Fyodor’s hand. “From Frunze in Kirghizia. I’m originally from Tashkent.”

“An Uzbek,” Fyodor recognized.

“A simple man.” Yuri tapped his chest. “No dreamer like you. I’ve spent my whole life wide awake.”

Tania looked at Yuri’s hand shake Fedya’s. His fingers were thick and powerful, with blunt nails. The knuckles were gnarled from labor. She guessed he had worked on one of the millions of Soviet collective farms. In Fedya’s smooth white grasp, Yuri’s calloused hand looked more like a tan bag of chestnuts than flesh.

“Well,” said Fedya, looking across the river at Stalingrad, “I’m awake now, I can tell you that.”

Yuri smiled at Tania. “And you, little tough one? Miss Sit-by-the-rail? You have a name?”

“Yes.” She wiped her hands on her trousers to clean off the bits of cheese. “Tania Alexeyevna Chernova.”

“And where are you from?”

Tania pursed her lips and hesitated. “New York.”

Yuri’s blue eyes popped wide. “New York, America?”

Fedya leaned over the cheese and bread. “New York City?”

“Yes,” she said in English.

Another bomb blasted ten meters from the port rail. Cold water cascaded. The bread and cheese in front of Tania were washed overboard. Near the bow, a soldier slumped and moaned.

Yuri and Fedya were distracted from their amazement at Tania. All the men on the deck fell silent save for the groaning soldier. His comrades slid aside to lay him down and cover him.

Fedya clutched the vodka bottle. He stood. Tania saw how large he was, with great shoulders and a midriff to match.

A kneeling Green Hat shouted, “Sit down, you!”

Fedya handed the guard the bottle.

“Here, give him this. Come on, man! Take it!”

The guard grabbed the bottle and threaded his way to the wounded soldier. Then Tania’s heart sank: she caught the whistle of an incoming artillery shell, the first one she’d heard in flight. She knew why.

“Down!” she screamed at Yuri and Fedya.

The three huddled together on the deck. The mortar shell struck directly amidships. The deck cracked open into great splinters and blew apart in a ball of flame and debris. The explosion deafened Tania. She flew backward, up and out into the flashing waters of the Volga.

SIX

NIKKI TRAINED HIS HEAVY MACHINE GUN ON THE doorway. He made sure the gun’s ammo belt was taut. He slid his hand along the broad, round barrel. It was colder than the Russian autumn.

He stared down the machine gun sight. It’s stupid to wait for the Russians to retreat, he thought. They won’t retreat. The Reds die in their holes. They’re not leaving this building. Neither are we.

He imagined himself pulling the trigger—saw Russians burst through the doorway, then twist and fall in front of his machine gun. They came, they leaped at him, he caught them with bullets, and they came, the bodies jamming the hall. The machine gun spit and spit, firing and roaring, mowing them down. And they kept pushing the bodies of their comrades out of the way to get to him. He let the trigger go and the gun kept firing on and on. He ran across the room, ran through the ruins. His unit ran after him, streaming out the windows, while here in this empty room the Reds kept running at the machine gun, falling in front of it, building the mound of dead, falling in front of it, falling…

“Mond. Corporal Mond.”

The voice pulled Nikki abruptly from his vision. Captain Mercker knelt beside him. He put his hand on Nikki’s right fist, clenching the grip. Nikki’s knuckles showed the white of bone.

“Easy, Corporal,” the captain said. “We’re all a little tense. Back it off a little.”

Nikki relaxed his hold and wiggled his fingers. The captain offered him a cigarette and a light.

“Mond, you were in the first group. Did you check that room on the other side of the hall?”

“Yes, sir. There was nobody in there.”

“How big is the room?”

“A little smaller than this one. Three windows like these.”

Mercker dragged on his cigarette. His cheeks hollowed. “They must’ve had the same plan we did to grab this building. We rushed in the front door while they were climbing in the windows.”

Nikki looked in the young officer’s eyes. He saw calm there.

“You’re new, sir?”

Mercker smiled. “Depends on what you call new. I was at Leningrad last year. Moscow this spring.”

Nikki ground out his cigarette to keep his hands on the machine gun grips.

“Stalingrad is new, sir. Never been anything like this. The front line can be a thousand meters or it can be a ceiling.” He looked at the door in front of his barrel. “Or a hall.”

Mercker said nothing. Nikki felt the invitation to go on.

“Russians are good at house-to-house fighting, better than we are. If they’d been here first, we’d never have gotten in. We’d have to blow the building up with them in it.” Nikki shook his head. “They’re not leaving, Captain.”

Mercker lit another cigarette. “What did you say about blowing them up in it?”

Three weeks ago, Nikki’s unit had occupied a house in the workers’ settlement west of the Tractor Factory. They’d found five Reds holed up in the basement. The men would not surrender. They did not retreat. After three days of stalemate, with the Russians fighting like crazy Ivans, they’d had to rip up floorboards and drop satchel charges into the basement. For five Reds, his unit had blown up an entire house.

Nikki told his captain this story. The moment he was done, muffled voices issued from across the hall. A song. The Russians were singing! Within seconds, a strong chorus formed. The song was loud and lusty. A dirty ballad, Nikki thought, from the laughter accompanying it. The

Reds are sending a message to the German company across the hall. There are plenty of Ivans in here, they’re singing to us, and they’re not going anywhere.

An idea gleamed in Mercker’s eyes. “You blew up a house for five Russians,” he said over the racket from across the hall. “We’ll blow one up for fifty.”

Mercker called for a messenger.

AFTER TWO HOURS OF NONSTOP SINGING, THE REDS quieted.

Twenty minutes later, Mercker’s courier returned through the window. He brought with him three sappers and their equipment: twenty kilos of dynamite, six shovels and pickaxes.

In the center of the room, one of the sappers raised a pickax. He struck a ringing blow on the concrete. Debris scurried from the strike like mice across the floor.

Mercker raised his hand. “Just a second.” He turned to the men. “Those Reds have shitty voices, don’t you think, boys? We should show them how a German sings a song. Loud. In fact, so loud that it’s all they can hear.”

The captain began the Nazi party song, “Horst Wessel.” The men joined in, even those with guns trained on the door and out the windows. Mercker stood in the center, swinging his arms like a conductor, whipping up the spirit and volume. The soldiers’ voices climbed to a roar. Mercker pointed with a flourish to the sapper to smack the concrete. The engineer swung down hard and the floor gave way in a jagged dent. The men smiled and applauded, and all they heard was their voices.

For three hours the soldiers sang. Folk songs, Bräuhaus ballads, popular tunes, even pieces of opera ricocheted off the walls to mask the digging. When the captain signaled the men to stop—again, like a conductor, with a wave of his hands—the tunnel had long since disappeared beneath the floor.

Nikki took his turn with a shovel for a thirty-minute shift, tossing broken earth out of the hole. The tunnel grew to five meters long, two meters wide at a depth of one and a half meters below the floor.

Inside there was just enough room for two men to kneel side by side and swing pickaxes. The plan was to burrow to the opposite side of the hall. Once beneath the Russians’ stronghold, two and a half meters below them, the fuse would be lit. “Twenty kilos of dynamite.” One of the sappers grinned and spit on the tunnel floor. “That ought to lift those Bolshi bastards halfway to heaven… or wherever.”

Weary and dirty, Nikki slumped against a wall. Three more men were in the hole now, shoveling out dirt. This made very little noise, so no singing was required to mask it. Mercker told the men to rest for a few hours, then another strong medley would be needed before dawn. “Think up some new songs,” he said. “And no opera. I hate that shit. I want songs about women.”

Mercker sat beside Nikki, drained and grimy. He offered a cigarette and closed his eyes. Nikki thought the young captain was funny, good for morale. He seemed a good leader with a ready ear and plenty of cigarettes. Nikki hoped the best for him, that he would not die here in Stalingrad and that he would live to hate opera as an old man.

On the other side of the hall the Russian voices struck up another song. “Goddammit.” Mercker’s eyes were still shut. “Can’t there be five minutes without a blasted song?”

The captain’s eyes sprang open. He sat off the wall, his face close to Nikki. “No,” he hissed, “there can’t.”

Mercker jumped to his feet. He grabbed a pickax and handed it to a soldier who was not yet dirty. “Get in there! Dig!” He motioned one of the sappers into the hole. He pointed at another soldier and handed him a pick.

“Let’s go. There’s no resting now,” he said urgently. “We can’t wait.”

Mercker carried the last shovel to the middle of the room. He pointed the tool across the hall at the singing Russians. “Those bastards are trying to blow us up, too!”

Nikki thumped his head against the wall. Of course. Damn. The Reds have a head start on us, maybe two hours.

All the men were awake now, all staring at the floor. Nikki pictured the race beneath the surface, wondering who was in the lead and by what distance, afraid that two meters below him a cask of dynamite sat sizzling.

“If the Reds stop singing,” Mercker called, “have a tune ready. And loud. Understand?” Everyone nodded. Mercker disappeared into the hole.

The race was on. The men dug with a desperate strength. They worked under cover of the Russians’ singing as long as it lasted, an hour or so at a time, then picked up their own chorus whenever the Reds stopped. When their voices flagged, the enemy burst into song.

Through the night, Nikki’s company did most of the singing. They gauged, the race in the tunnels by who flung the most verses across the corridor. We must be catching up, Nikki thought. We’ve even added a harmonica. The Reds don’t have a harmonica.

Flickering lamplight glimmered from the tunnel. Silhouettes descended and the bent, blackened shapes of others staggered out. The round, glowing hole in the middle of the floor looked to Nikki like a threshold to the netherworld with its shadowy demons coming and going.

At dawn, Mercker emerged, his face streaked with muddy sweat. He sat and motioned for Nikki.

The man looked exhausted. He spoke in a rasping voice, his head hung.

“The sappers say we’ve got one more hour of digging. Tell the men to get into their groups of ten.”

Nikki nodded. The captain tugged Nikki’s tunic with a blackened hand. “You’re in the first group. Secure that trench. Hold there until I get the rest of us out.”

Gathering their rifles, Nikki’s patrol moved to the windows. The guard nodded, and Nikki leaned out to search the debris-riddled street. He jumped down and waved for his men to follow. One by one they landed, and he pushed them toward the trench.

The Russians stopped singing. Nikki smiled at the guard in the window. “Give them some opera,” he said. He turned and ran.

Ten meters from the trench, a roaring wave swept over him. The ground rose, then jerked down to trip him. The air reached for him. He was caught in the grip of a powerful, careless force that knocked him down, lifted him, and flung him in a somersault away from the exploding building.

He landed on his back and skidded on his shoulders. The part of the building held by his company leaped out from its foundation, walls bulging hideously. Deafened, his skin reddened by the blast, Nikki scrambled for the trench to tumble into the arms of his men while a massive fireball gathered behind him, orange and blue, and erupted. The side of the building burst with a shattering boom, then fell straight down as if a trap door had opened. It dissolved until the last grinding bits came to rest. Above the devastation, a mushroom of smoke and dust curled and shifted, forming a gray and ghostly marker where the walls had stood seconds before.

My company is dead, Nikki thought. Mercker, all of them. No chance.

On the morning breeze, a song seemed to come from everywhere at once. It merged with the sounds of the embattled city, bouncing off the empty, broken walls on all sides, ringing from the dead ruins.

The song was in Russian.

SEVEN

TANIA FLAILED TO THE SURFACE OF THE ICY RIVER.

She looked back at the burning wreckage of the barge. The stern and bow had been cleaved into separate pieces. They pointed up into the night to pirouette in slow, smoky circles.

A touch at the back of her neck made her spin around. The outstretched hand of a dead soldier bobbed into her face. She swung wildly at the corpse and backpedaled. Another hand fell on her shoulder. This grasp was firm and alive—Fedya, the writer. Treading water beside him was Yuri.

She could not make out what Fedya was saying. Her ears felt stuffed by the explosion. She knew she was surrounded by sound— the cries of the wounded thrashing in the water, the bombs seeking the rest of the fleet upriver, even the shouts of Fedya and Yuri—but all were like mumblings trapped in a bottle.

A timber floated past. Yuri grabbed it. Already they’d drifted far south of the Tractor Factory landing stage. The shore was four hundred meters off. Tania estimated the current would beach them near the city center if they kicked hard. She wondered who would control the land they stepped onto.

Gripping the beam, Tania stared at Stalingrad. She ignored the nervous, quiet chattering of the two men clinging to the timber with her; she could not hear them clearly, and soon they stopped talking. Inside this isolation she balled her fists and cast a vow into the ruins, driving it like a spike into the heart of every Nazi hiding in the rubble.

She swore to renew her war against the Germans, a vendetta begun over a year earlier when the occupation army in Minsk had murdered her grandparents, a doctor and his ballet-teacher wife.

Tania had come to visit her grandparents only two months before their deaths, from the Manhattan apartment of her parents. She’d arrived to convince the two beloved elder folks with whom she’d spent several summers to come live in America and escape the gathering storm in Europe. There was not much time, she warned; Hitler’s nonaggression pact with Stalin was a farce, and they shouldn’t believe it. She brought money from her father, Alexander, the son of the Chernovs. She could take them away. But the doctor and his beautiful dancing wife, both of them gray—though not in the manner of ashes, not cold and old but shining—would not leave Minsk. There was work to be done there, they told her, bodies for them to heal and children to teach. There was family for them to protect, two daughters and grandchildren, and there was family history in Minsk, graves and relics and memories. Stalin was too strong for Hitler, they answered, Russia too strong; Hitler knew this.

Tania urgently wrote her parents in New York, begging them to come and beg themselves. But there was only one response, a telegram instructing Tania to return immediately to New York, and wishing the grandparents luck in the coming hard days. Tania’s father had been upset when she left; it was dangerous, he’d said. She was only nineteen years old. Tania told him to give her money, enough to rescue the old ones, or she would go without his money and earn it there to bring them back. Alexander, a young scientist who had brought his new bride to America in 1912 in the waning days of the czar, drawn by the promise shouting out of America as if from a carnival hawker of a new and comfortable life for the couple and for the child they hoped to bear one day, cried when that child hefted her baggage down the stairs to a waiting taxi. Tania cried, too, tears of anger at her parents who had raised her to speak and love everything Russian, to jeer at the memory of the toppled Russian royals, to rejoice at the surging Soviet Communist power as the salvation of the Russian peoples, to be proud of her heritage. She took her parents’ rhetoric seriously. She joined the American Communist Party as a teenager and visited, their native land as often as she could. She grew to love the faraway places and the people and the myths that milled in her own blood. Minsk and Soviet Russia became her spiritual sanctuaries, and her grandparents there became avatars of Russian simplicity and courage. Now her own mother and father were revealed as two-faced, big thinkers and storytellers who were Russian by birth only, not spirit. They hunkered in their wealth and hearth, secure in New York, smug in their mail-order intellectual loyalty to Russia. But when it came time for them to stand up, to rise for the sake of their papushka and mamushka, they would not. They cowered in their brownstone, their Americanness, their freedom. Slamming the taxi door, Tania swore that her tears would be the last she would shed until she returned with her grandparents or saw them safe somehow. She did not understand then how she would soon weep at their deaths. On July 22, 1941, six weeks after her arrival in Minsk, three million German troops swarmed across the Russian border. Two weeks later, Minsk was encircled and captured, with over 150,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner. German tanks took up sentry positions on every street. Electricity and water ran uninterrupted in the city, market stalls remained open, but wings had folded over Minsk. Heads everywhere in the city were heavy; feet dragged, eyes darted. Where was the Red Army, where was deliverance?

Dark squads known as the Black Crows began to kick on doors in the city. Soon they came into the Chernovs’ neighborhood, at first to the homes of the Jewish families, then to others, even the respected ones. Three weeks after the city’s occupation, Dr. and Mrs. Chernov were taken from their small apartment as they sat at dinner with Tania. Tania herself was clubbed with the butt of a Nazi rifle when she resisted the kidnapping. Before she could rouse herself from the bludgeoning, her grandparents were marched to the city square only three blocks away and executed. The two stood accused of collaborating with the underground, a claim supported only by the fact that Dr. Chernov had treated many patients who bore the marks of the Nazis’ brutal inquisitions. At the rifles’ reports, Tania jerked off the floor. Bloodied and wobbling, she ran outside to the sound and arrived in the square, smelling the cordite smoke of the bullets. Neighbors she did not recognize held her back, screaming. That night, Tania went to the home of her aunt Vera and told her what had happened. Tania’s tears flowed, squeezed from her in a spasm. When she was done, she was finally dry, without tears. Vera must have seen this in her young niece’s swollen eyes, for she said, “Stay here with me. Don’t go.” Tania said only, “I’m leaving the city to find the resistance.”

The older woman put her arms around the girl. Before closing the door, Vera whispered, “Then fight hard, my Russian niece.”

She left the city and for a week followed the sounds of fighting in the forests and villages. In the hamlet of Vianka, sleeping in a barn, she was approached by a dark cast of men, hunting rifles crooked over their arms. She was interrogated and allowed to join them.

Among the resistance fighters, Tania soon lost the tastes of her former privileged life in Manhattan and Minsk. She came to know the skills of the partisan for the taking of lives. She laid mines and rigged dynamite along tracks and under transports; she learned to fire a rifle and pistol and the ways to use a stiletto or bare hands for close-in killing. She shared a kinship with the guerrillas: they were linked by pain. Each man and woman in the cadre had suffered some blow of Nazi cruelty. Tania put her loathing of the Nazis in place of her grief for her grandparents and her anger at her own mother and father; fighting the Germans became her mourning and her apology for what she felt was a stain of cowardice on her American clan. After a year of freezing and killing and running in the forests, of exulting over the smallest victories, Tama walked out of the woods to join a passing column of army regulars. She had long before thrown away her American papers. She claimed residency in Minsk, at her grandparents’ address. She was given papers for the 284th Division, climbed on a truck, and rode five hundred kilometers south to Stalingrad.

Now, in the freezing waters of the Volga, Tania’s feet finally dragged onto a sandbar. She let go of the timber and splashed toward the shore, followed by Fedya and Yuri. Her ears had cleared, and the noises of battle reached her from far upstream. Nothing else broke the dark quiet.

The three crouched, dripping and cold, on the cool shore. The beach was littered with abandoned machinery and crates. Tania decided the safest direction to travel would be not into silence but north, toward the fighting in the factory district. There they would find Russians.

They’d floated downstream several kilometers. We could walk to the factories before dawn, she thought, if we’re not caught. But if the Germans have taken the city center, there’ll be patrols operating on the riverbank to stop infiltrators.

Tania whispered, “Follow me. We’ll go north.”

Fedya moved behind her. Yuri hesitated. “Tell me your name again,” Yuri asked.

“Private Tania Chernova.”

“Tania, then. Tania, I cannot follow a girl. Not even an American girl. I will lead the way.”

She showed the old man an empty face. She had nothing to prove to Yuri. He’d seen her thrash away from the corpse in the water, but he knew nothing of the partisan who’d sliced a dozen throats or laid mines under a supply train, then walked among the wounded completing the job with her pistol. He’d not seen the doctor’s granddaughter garrote a prisoner after he spilled his secrets to her guerrilla cadre, or hide all day until she could fire a rifle to kill at three hundred meters.

But the old farmer was with her now and he was here to kill Germans. For that alone she would try to keep him alive. Let him die being useful, not stupid, she thought.

“Yuri, I’ve spent the last year in the resistance. I’ve been fighting in the forests of Byeloruss, not pushing a plow in the fields. I know the Nazis and I know how to keep us alive. I’ll lead or I’ll go alone.”

She turned to Fedya. “You, too.”

Tania walked up the beach. From behind came quiet but firm words, then the crunching footsteps of the two men.

After an hour of starting and stopping at every noise, it was clear they would not reach the factories before dawn. Tania looked for a place where they could wait out the coming daylight, to continue their trek later under darkness.

They walked for another hour, searching the cliffs for an abandoned cave or bunker. With first light playing at the fringe of the horizon, a foul odor wafted out of the night. Tania wrinkled her nose and stepped faster. A tall pipe emerged in the darkness; it ran the short distance from the base of the cliff to the river. The pipe was two meters high. Fetid air tumbled from its mouth, a stench Tania felt through her skin.

Fedya gasped, “It’s a sewer drain.”

Yuri and Tania locked eyes. Both nodded.

Fedya stepped back, repulsed by the idea. “Oh, my God, you’re kidding. We can’t go in there. That’s shit! There’s shit all over the place in there. We can’t… there’s no way!”

Tania moved closer to Fedya. She put her fingers to her lips. “We don’t have any choice. It’ll be light soon.”

Yuri stepped forward. “It’s just shit, Fedya. We throw it on the fields every day. It’ll make you grow.”

“It’ll make me puke!”

Tania moved to the lip of the pipe. She turned to Fedya. “In here, no one will notice. Come on.”

She took her first steps through the sewer pipe as if leaning into a gale. She brought the inside of her elbow up to her nose to filter the filth through her tunic. Even so, the smell crept in through her eyes and ears.

She looked back at Yuri and Fedya. Yuri laid his arms across his chest to walk with his head held high, as though he might lift his nose above the odor. Fedya took large, slow steps, flapping his arms and shaking his hands like a tightrope walker.

“Walk, Fedya,” Tania whispered, “we’ve only just started.”

“Oh, God,” he mumbled.

Twenty meters from the mouth of the sewer, the dim light from the opening receded to leave them wrapped in total blackness. Tania ran her hand along the slimy wall to guide her steps. She felt a brush of cool air against her cheek. “There’s an opening ahead,” she said.

Her hand slid off the wall into open space. Another pipe had linked with the main line. “This seems to head north. We’ll walk until it’s past dawn. Then we’ll look for a manhole and climb out. With luck we’ll be behind our own lines.”

Tania shook her boots. Excrement clung to them and her pants legs. She felt the muddy damp where it had splashed onto her thighs. Behind her, Fedya made very few splashes. He was probably on tiptoes, she thought, as if there were a way to avoid stepping on shit in a sewer.

“Tania,” Yuri called, “tell us about America.”

Tania licked her lips, sweat salting her tongue. She did not want to talk, but she recognized that Yuri was only trying to quell their fear.

“Do you read, old farmer?” “Yes, of course.”

“What do you read about America?”

“That it is a country of decadence. Bright lights, whores, businessmen squeezing money from the poor. Gangsters. Riches.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Only the parts about the riches and the whores. The good stuff.”

This made Tania laugh, and she closed her mouth to stop from telling Yuri he was wrong, that he had left out so much more, good and bad stuff. America was a giant land of peace and opportunity and, yes, decadence. That it was America the beautiful, especially for those who were white and male with English surnames. That America was a bully. That America was afraid of this war with the Germans, just like her parents. And that she was Russian; she would fight for Russia and she would hate the Nazis if America would not.

Tania wanted to divert the attention from herself. “Fedya,” she said, echoing over their sloshing footsteps, “tell us one of your poems.”

“Yes, good.” Yuri picked this up. “Tell us a favorite.”

“Here? Now?” Fedya sounded shocked. “I mean… you want me to tell you a poem? I can barely breathe in here.”

“Oh, come on. When will you have better acoustics?”

Good, Tania thought, Yuri is distracting the frightened boy from Moscow.

“My God,” Fedya answered. “All right, but I never said I was good.”

He stopped walking. Tania and Yuri halted also. The rippling echoes died.

“It’s called ‘The Washing River.’ It’s one I seem to recall quite clearly at the moment. I don’t know why. I’m in a goddammed sewer and I’m scared out of my wits. But here it is.”

He began in a whisper, in a voice oddly reverent for the surroundings.

Fedya cleared his throat. “Well, there you are.”

Tania was stricken by the poem; she felt his voice woven directly into her. The poem, singular in the sewer’s darkness, had become for its few moments the lone reality of her senses. She’d been isolated with the words. Now, with the poem finished, it echoed inside her, slapping against her memories, the rocks in her heart.

Yuri sloshed to Fedya and clapped him on the back. “Why do you poets always hate your own work? That was beautiful. It made me miss my own mother.”

“I don’t hate it. Why do you say I hate it?”

“I had to twist your arm to tell it to me.”

“Yuri, for God’s sake. We’re in a sewer!”

“That’s our poet,” Yuri laughed. “Misses nothing.”

Yuri moved closer to Tania. He found her with his hand. “General Tania. I can drag my hand along this nasty wall almost as well as you. With your leave, I’ll take the lead for a while.”

She smiled, though Yuri could not see it. “Yes, of course. Thank you.”

She listened to the farmer’s footsteps splashing away. Fedya’s feet slogged behind her. Tania waited for him to approach. The big lad’s hand touched her, nudging her forward. She held steady against his fingers and let the touch sink into her ribs. She closed her eyes and felt the hand with her woman’s senses, almost forgotten. Something inside her, a twinge, a twist, pushed back against Fedya. She caught it, held it, and breathed once for it. Then she hid it.

They walked in unrelenting blackness for another hour. The watery echoes of their steps hurtled into the dark, scraping along the walls. Tania began to feel she was falling into an endless shaft. The stench seared her nostrils. She was light-headed; a gagging nausea choked her.

Once, her balance reeled. She reached into the dark to cross Fedya’s path. Her fingers brushed his chest.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes. Just exhausted. Every breath, it’s like sucking in a garbage heap.”

“Why haven’t we seen any manholes? I’m sure it’s dawn by now.” Perhaps he believed she knew the answer.

She exhaled, looking into a darkness so total it seemed eternal in expanse instead of half a meter above their heads.

“They’re probably covered up with debris from the bombings,” she said. “Come on. We’ll find one ahead.”

Tania took another wretched step. “Fedya,” she called out, “you go in front. I feel like following for a while. All right?”

Fedya squeezed her arm. Tania pulled herself forward.

Minutes passed. Suddenly, Fedya’s voice shot out.

“Yuri!”

Tania slid a hand against the muck of the wall to keep her balance; she held the other hand outstretched to find Fedya and Yuri. She came upon Fedya struggling in the mire. She laid both hands on his wet back. He was trying to lift Yuri from the sewer floor.

“Yuri!” he cried, his voice frantic, “Yuri, get up! Tania, he’s fainted! What do we do?”

“Quick, lift him up!” Tania helped Fedya haul Yuri out of the filth. The old man’s shirt and hair were soaked in water and excreta. Holding him close to lift him, Tania wrestled down her revulsion while her own clothes became caked.

“He’s passed out from the fumes,” Tania panted. They propped Yuri against the wall. “Damn it, he seemed fine.”

“He was,” Fedya insisted. “He is fine. He’ll be all right. He just needs a moment to wake up.”

Tania put her hand against Yuri’s wet chest. His breathing was shallow. “Hold him.” She stepped away from Yuri, measured the distance with her outstretched hand in the dark, and slapped him across his slumped face. Nothing. She slapped him again. Dampness sprayed from his cheek, sprinkling her eyes. Yuri made no sound.

“You’ll have to carry him,” Tania said. “Can you do that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

Tania thought of Fedya laboring in this sewer, with Yuri a yoke across his shoulders. It would be only a short time before he, too, would succumb to the treacherous air.

“No, wait. Let’s drag him. Put his arm around your neck.”

Fedya and Tania hoisted Yuri’s arms over their shoulders. They staggered on with Yuri’s legs limp. Tania listened for any sign of consciousness from the old farmer’s mouth.

After ten minutes of exertion and rising fear, she’d heard nothing from Yuri. She jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow. His breath jumped in an unconscious wheeze.

Tania asked Fedya, “How do you feel?”

“I can go on.

Tania walked on and thought, I can’t. I’m exhausted and I want to throw up. Another few minutes of this and I’ll be on my knees, if not my face, in the shit. I’m sorry, Yuri.

She pivoted Yuri to the wall and took Fedya’s hands off him to let him slide to a sitting position. She held Yuri’s head up.

“Take off his shirt,” she said.

“Why? So he can breathe better? That doesn’t make sense.”

“No. Under his tunic he’s wearing a farmer’s longjohn. Take off your army shirt and put it on.”

Fedya snapped back. “We’re leaving him here? To die in a sewer? No! No! I can carry him! You’re not leaving him!”

Tania leaned against the opposite wall. Fedya, she thought, you’ll die here, too. So will I.

She was spent, too tired even to vent her frustration at ending her life beneath the streets of Stalingrad, in the dark and filth instead of out in the light, in the sound and heat of battle. Or I might have died old and in bed, surrounded by my children. Dying is blackness. Dying smells rotten, too. Look at me, where I am. Maybe I’m dead already.

She walked past Fedya, listening to her own stumbling footsteps. Her senses careened. She caught herself against the wall. Her stomach convulsed and she vomited on the wall. The sound of the spasm flew off like bats into the emptiness.

Tania righted herself and a weakness ascended in her legs. She recognized it as her death knell. Without intending it, she turned from the wall and walked, at least to die moving. The weakness tried to trip her. From behind came the splashing of quick footsteps. A hand appeared and held her up. The grasp bore her with a strength she thought could no longer exist in this hole. She reached to take Fedya’s arm and felt that he was carrying Yuri’s undershirt.

Tania walked in silence, unaware of time. She forgot her notions of traveling for more hours to reach any particular location in the city above. Her steps were measured now against her remaining strength. Her only goal was unfettered air, sunlight, and unechoed sound. Her feet grew leaden, and her breath came slow and labored. She walked stiffly with Fedya for her crutch; her concentration was focused in her calves and thighs to resist the coming end of her power. She dragged herself onward, as if in leg irons, and clung to the arm around her middle. The blackness of the pipe threatened to infect all of her, blotting her out of consciousness, completing the darkness. She stumbled on, ticking off the list of her departing senses: I can no longer smell the tunnel, she thought. I can no longer feel my hands or Fedya’s arm. I can no longer hear my footsteps. I can…

Something gleamed in the blackness ahead. My death, she thought. There it is. At least there will be light.

She lunged away from Fedya. A white spear twinkled ten meters ahead, shooting down at an angle. Tania thrust her face into the shaft of light as if it were a gushing fountain. Puffs of dust danced inside the beam, wandering slowly through it, tiny ballerinas floating across a spotlighted stage.

Tania heaved her chest against the wall to feel feverishly with her hands. She leaped to the other side.

“Here it is!” she croaked. “A ladder! It’s a manhole.” Fedya lurched forward toward the ladder. “Let’s go.” She felt him ready himself for the climb, and she reached out to stop him. The touch of the ladder, of salvation, had rekindled some of her strength.

“No. Put on Yuri’s shirt,” she whispered. “Calm down. We’re going to be all right. But I…” she smelled the foulness of her surroundings as if for the first time. She reeled and steadied. “I must go up first.”

“I suppose I’m not to argue with you about these things, am I?” he said, pulling off his Red Army tunic.

“No. I’ll signal you to come up. Walk away from the manhole. If I find Germans up there, they may climb down to see if anyone’s with me. Stay silent. If you hear them coming down, lie flat. They’ll fire soon as they drop. They certainly won’t chase you down here. Find another manhole and try again.”

Tania laid her hands on the ladder’s rungs. She climbed two steps. Fedya touched her leg.

“Tania.”

“No. Walk away.”

She waited for him to move beyond the ladder. She climbed to the manhole cover and shoved it aside as quietly as she could.

Daylight pushed in on her eyes. She ducked her head below the level of the street and blinked until she could see.

When her eyes adjusted, she raised her head slowly. They had been lucky. The manhole was shielded on all four sides by ripples of rubble. The facades of a row of large stone buildings had teetered into the street here and crumbled on all sides of the manhole, somehow failing to cover it. Tania clambered out of the hole and lay on her belly in the debris. She gulped the morning air. She heard nothing but the faraway pops of rifle fire. She hung her head into the manhole and said softly into the dark, “Come up.”

Fedya climbed onto the street. He inhaled in great grateful swallows. She saw how filthy Fedya was, how scabrous was the front of Yuri’s longjohn shirt. He wore the boots and olive khakis of the Red Army, but she hoped the longjohn and the overall condition of his dress would hide him from scrutiny. She looked at herself lying in the dust, coated like Fedya with a brown, rusty crust. She was just a young girl covered in shit.

The two climbed to the top of the rock pile. To the north was a line of Germans holding tins in front of a mess tent. Fedya stiffened at the sight of the Nazis as if he wanted to duck back into the debris. Tania hissed at him to stay straight up.

“No sudden moves. We’re behind enemy lines. We can’t run or crawl out We’ll have to walk out.”

Fedya met her eyes. She smacked her dry lips once.

He grabbed her hand. “No, Tania. You’re kidding.” She shook loose his grip. “Tania,” he pleaded, “nobody is that crazy.”

She scrabbled down the mound, raising a dust cloud. At the bottom she called up to Fedya, frozen with his hands out from his sides, “Come on!” She waved him down with big gestures. “We’ve got to eat. I’m exhausted. I’m starving. This could be our last chance for the next twenty-four hours.”

Fedya held his ground on the rubble heap.

“They won’t know we’re in the Russian army,” she called. “We’re not carrying weapons. We’re walking around in the open. They’ll just think you’re some poor local worker who got latrine duty today and is taking a break for lunch.”

“What about you?” he asked down to her.

“Me?” Tania shrugged. “I guess they’ll figure I’m some whore who’s working with you for food. Who cares? They’ll make up their own stories so long as we keep our mouths shut.”

Fedya slapped his hands on his hips in resignation. He picked his way down with measured strides. Such a large man, she thought, covered in crap and taking such small steps.

Fedya landed at her side. He frowned.

“You’re the devil. Do you know that?”

“I can be. Come on. Say nothing.”

They walked across open ground and took places at the end of the mess line. Impatient soldiers tapped their knives and forks on their plates.

For these sticks to be standing about waiting for mess like this, she thought, we’re far behind their lines. They’re acting like they’re very safe here.

The line moved a few paces. Tania looked into Fedya’s face. He stared at his boots, still caked but now covered in dust. He looked like a peasant from the villages, not a poet from Moscow. “Was im Himmel?”

A Nazi pinched his nose in disgust. He stomped to Fedya and pushed him out of line, pointing for Tania to move also.

The two stood several paces back. They waited for the last soldier to disappear into the tent. They crept forward, obedient looks on their faces. Once inside, the cook tossed them plates and hurriedly scooped up knockwurst and kraut.

Fedya whispered while they walked into the tent, “Let’s eat outside.”

“No, I don’t want to draw attention.”

“Attention?” he said in quiet amazement. “Tania, we smell like camels. What more attention could we get?”

She shushed him and moved ahead. Around them a hundred Nazis sat eating. At each table, heads spun about when they passed. Fingers hurried to noses on appalled faces.

They found an open table and sat quickly. They shoveled the food into their mouths, afraid they would be thrown out before they could slake their hungers.

Midway through their plates, an officer approached. He held a kerchief daintily over his nose and spoke to them through the cloth. His voice became shrill. Tania and Fedya got up slowly.

They did not seem to move fast enough for the officer. The man lowered the kerchief and pulled a leather crop from his belt. He swung the crop across Fedya’s back. Soldiers at neighboring tables applauded and laughed.

The German, his face growing crimson, struck Fedya again, then leaned across the table and hit Tania on top of her head.

Fedya leaped to his feet and shoved him back. “Leave her alone, prostitute!”

The officer regained his balance and looked deep into Fedya’s eyes. He slid the crop slowly into his belt. He unbuttoned the holster for his pistol.

“Ah.” He smiled thinly.

The officer stepped back and drew his sidearm with a dramatic, sweeping motion. He glanced around the silent tent. He raised the pistol to Fedya’s heart and looked around the room again. The hundred faces were still.

The grinning Nazi interpreted the silence of his fellows as their tacit permission. He was justified in the execution of these two incredibly odious Russians.

Tania stepped to stand beside Fedya.

“Da svidanya, Russ,” the German said.

A commotion erupted in the kitchen. The din of pots and pans banging on the floor spilled into the mess tent. The officer turned from Fedya.

A short, chubby man in a greasy apron burst into the mess hall. “Halt! Halten Sie, bitte!” he shouted. The man rumbled through the seated soldiers to jump in front of Fedya and Tania, his arms outstretched. In one hand he held high a wooden serving spoon.

The cook pleaded with the officer in stammering German. He pointed to Fedya and Tania, then to himself, and hung his head. The Nazi lowered the pistol and shouted at the cook. The round little man cringed, wrinkling his dirty apron. Then he snapped upright and clubbed Fedya’s chest with the spoon. With his other hand he twisted Tania’s ear, turning her around. He kicked her in the rear and shoved Fedya in the chest again with the spoon to herd them toward the kitchen, hollering in Russian. Over his shoulder, the cook called in an appeasing tone, “Danke. Danke schön, mein Herr. Danke.”

The cook shoved Fedya through the kitchen door and pushed Tania behind him. Still shouting and cursing, he marched them out of the kitchen to a small, garbage-filled courtyard.

Once outside, the cook quieted. He whispered urgently in Russian, “Who are you? What are you doing in my mess hall?”

Tania shoved the cook in his meaty chest. “What are you doing serving food to Nazis? You’re a fucking hiwi!”

Fedya stepped between them. “Tania! The man just saved your life. And mine, too. Be quiet, show some gratitude.”

“Gratitude? This pig cooks for those bastards. He’s worse than they are! He’s a traitor, Fedya! A collaborator!”

“Tania.” Fedya put his hands on her shoulders. “I’ll take the lead now. You will follow me. Understand? I’ll get us out of here. You’ll get us killed. Now be quiet.”

Tania inhaled to say more, to tell Fedya about the hiwis her partisans had caught and shot, about the placards they’d nailed to the traitors’ heads to warn others not to cooperate with the invaders. Fedya shook her shoulders hard. Tania jammed her fists into her pockets, glowering at the fat traitor.

Fedya reached his hand to the cook. “Thank you. You saved our lives. What did you say to that German?”

“That you are two Russian peasants working for me. I told him I sent you to clean out the shithouse and you must have fallen in.”

“Really? Just like that?” Fedya turned to Tania. “A good story. A quick thinker, isn’t he?”

Tania spat. “Fucking hiwi.”

Fedya turned back to the cook. “Right. Let’s just keep this between you and me, shall we? Can you get us some clean clothes?”

“No,” said the cook. “Who are you? How did you get here?”

“We’re with the 284th Division. Our transport was sunk. Once we got ashore, this girl led us through the sewer.”

“You followed her?” The cook pointed with his spoon.

Tania leaned forward. Fedya kept her back with his girth.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he warned the man quietly.

The cook lowered the spoon.

Fedya continued, his manner still friendly. “Can you give us more food?”

“Of course.” The cook went back to the kitchen. He stopped in the doorway. “I’ll bring it out.”

Fedya spun on Tania. “What’s wrong with you? How can you treat a man that way who’s saved your life?”

“He’s helping the Germans!”

“He’s a nothing little cook. How do you know his story? He might have a wife and children they’re holding. He might be just a simple scared fat man who got caught up in all this and only wants to live through it.”

Tania leaned against the top of a metal trash can. “If he’s a coward,” she said, “then he should be shot.”

Fedya folded his arms. She looked into his blue eyes and took in his powerful figure. I want to live through it, too, she thought. She felt the sadness overtaking her, prodded by Fedya’s scolding. So badly I want to live. But I’m already dead. The Germans took my life, they took my homeland and my good grandparents. All I have left is this soulless body. And I’ve sworn on blood to hurl myself against them until my body breaks, or my life and my tears return one day when the sticks are gone. But I, Fedya, Yuri, this cook, Russia—we are all of us dead right now. And to live again we can only fight. We must not, cannot, do anything else.

Fedya unfolded his arms. “We are not all so brave as you.”

He reached for Tania and held her lightly. She laid her head on his chest, then pulled away.

“You stink.”

The cook returned with steaming plates of kraut and a thick brown hash. He set them on top of a garbage can.

“The fighting comes mostly from that direction,” he said, pointing to a horizon of devastation. “The front line is three kilometers away. The other way is the Volga. Don’t go there. It’s patrolled.”

The cook looked at Fedya and nodded. Fedya returned the courtesy. The little man’s eyes shifted quickly to Tania, unsure of what they would meet there.

The cook spread his palms to her. His flabby chest shook under the splattered apron. He seemed about to cry.

“You can’t understand,” he said.

Fedya answered for her. “Who can?”

The cook wiped his nose on his sleeve and turned to the kitchen. Fedya and Tania emptied their plates. They climbed out of the courtyard and entered the ruins to find the Russian lines. There was little movement in the streets. Nazi squads patrolled the shadows; sandbagged machine gun emplacements glared from the gaping wounds in the walls. Small packs of homeless, ragged citizens wandered trancelike through the charred, pocked, and eerily placid ruins. They dug into the debris to pocket bits of clothing and utensils to help them survive the holocaust of their city. The Germans left these mortal phantoms alone. Tania and Fedya hoped to be similarly ignored, counted among the forsaken.

If they did encounter a suspicious patrol, she’d told Fedya to act retarded, drool, and mumble. She would use hand signals to somehow tell the soldiers that the city asylum had been blown up and the large boy was just a harmless inmate. She’d found him in the streets and was leading him to the Russian rear for evacuation. They were covered in shit because they’d fallen into a ruptured sewer, latrine, whatever. If Fedya could act the fool, the Germans ought to buy it—at least until she could concoct a better plan.

“But don’t worry,” she assured Fedya, “they won’t stop us. We’re unarmed. We’re walking around in the open, no threat to them. And besides, we’re covered in shit, remember?”

“Oh. I keep forgetting that,” he said. “Wonderful. I think I’ll wear shit for the rest of the war. It’s the safest way to go, don’t you think? Like armor.”

They zigzagged through the ruins into the afternoon. A German squad passed them, the soldiers clopping and jingling in their heavy boots and packs. She cursed in a mad, high-pitched Byelorussian dialect while Fedya whooped like an idiot. Only one soldier in the patrol looked at them. He held his nose. The squad jogged into the shell of a building and disappeared up a stairwell.

Ahead, three hundred meters away across a desolate boulevard, was a railroad yard littered with the twisted steel curlicues of torn-up track and burned-out train cars. Just east of the tracks was a large building, five stories high and two blocks long. The windows had been blown out, and streaks of soot showed above each broken window frame, evidence of a gutting fire. Blackened German tanks cluttered the terrain. From where Tania and Fedya stood, the base of the ravaged building, across the open rail yard, was no less than eight hundred meters away.

Tania looked back at the building into which the Nazi patrol had run. Gun muzzles bristled from several windows, all facing west across the tracks.

This is the front line, she thought. No-man’s-land.

She looked up at the afternoon sun. It would be too dangerous to cross the tracks in daylight. They could easily be caught in a crossfire or mistaken for deserters or spies by either side. Across the boulevard sat a brick railman’s shed. Tania tugged on Fedya’s sleeve.

“We’ll wait in that shed. After dark we’ll crawl across the tracks.” She pointed to the five-story building across from them. “That’s where the Red Army is.”

Fedya looked over the rail yard. “How do you know?”

Tania walked toward the shed. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the enemy in the building behind her. She heard the clacking and scrambling as they set up their mortars and tripods in the windows.

“They know.”

Behind the shed’s wooden door, empty shelves held only dust and broken glass. Screws and greasy clamps littered the floorboards. The window was broken, but the roof was intact.

Along the wall crouched a spring bed frame and a cotton mattress. The bedding was covered with glass and dirt. Tania flipped the mattress to a cleaner side. It showed powder blue and gray pinstripes with russet stains. The air was close, reeking of oil and emptiness. Tania struck the mattress with the flat of her hand. She backed away from a billow of dust.

“Some curtains, some flowers in the window.” She turned to Fedya in the doorway. “I could plant us a garden for fresh vegetables.”

“Comfy.” He entered and sat on the bed. “A writer’s cottage by the tracks. Trains have always been a romantic topic for me.”

Tania stood in front of him. “Take off that miserable shirt. It stinks, and it makes me think of poor Yuri.”

She tugged on the crusted tunic. Fedya raised his arms. She slid the shirt off him and flung it out the window.

“Boots.” She pointed at his feet. “You can take those off yourself.”

Fedya untied the laces. Tania undid her jacket and kicked it into a corner. Her blouse was of a rough spun flax, the color of straw. Sweat stains darkened the armpits and collar. She reached for the top button.

Fedya looked up from his boots. She followed his eyes to the points of her breasts.

“Tania,” he said quietly. “I, um…” His eyes went to her hands poised at her neck. “Are you going to undo your shirt?”

“Yes, I am.” She unfastened the first button, then another. “We can’t go anywhere until after dark. I’m tired, and I’m sure you are, too. I thought we’d get some sleep.”

She sat beside him and bounced. The springs squeaked.

Fedya gazed out to the rail yard. “Is anyone going to bother us in here? Should we both sleep at the same time?”

“The only one who’s going to bother you in here,” she said, leaning down to untie her own laces, “is me.”

She sent the boots flying into the corner to land on her coat, then reached behind Fedya to run her palm over his broad back. He leaned forward, chin in hand, elbows on knees. She kneaded the muscles along his shoulder blades.

“Ah,” he whispered, closing his eyes, “that is magnificent. Really. After the day we’ve had.”

She dropped her hand from his back, and he opened his eyes. She saw the quizzical, bothered look on his face.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked.

She shook her head slowly. “Today… today was nothing.”

She pulled back her hair so he could see her face, all of it. She didn’t know if he could see what was in her eyes. Did it come through? Could she ever show it to him, or even express it? The months of running, fighting, killing, and surviving. Surviving for what? To live more scarred years, to turn the pages on fifty more calendars, marking anniversaries of hatred without respite, stretching onward to her own death? Hatred without compassion, humanity, or morality; hatred stripped clean of all else, like bones in the sun? This was her dowry; this was what awaited her, even if she survived Stalingrad. She could never outrun or outlive it. It would follow her even if she carried it back to bright America someday. But could she show Fedya, anyone, ever? Or was it just hers, alone, to the grave?

She took his hand. “Today Yuri died. But he was already dead. He died last night when he came across that river. You died, too. I died a year ago in Minsk when the Nazis murdered my grandparents. I died of shame when my own parents would not come with me to save them. Do you understand?”

Fedya took her hand. The rims of his eyes reddened. He blinked. A tear welled in his eye.

“This is what the politrooks are telling us,” she continued. “The NKVD, Red Star, the Party—everywhere we turn, the message is the same. You are dead. You have no life. The Germans have taken it. They have trampled it.”

Tania reached to Fedya’s face, smearing the tear with her finger. “Fedushka, there’s nothing anymore for the individual. Not love. Not fear. Not family. We’re not alive. Nothing we do matters. We’re like ghosts who can’t touch anything. The only time we appear, the only time we’re real, is when we’re killing the Germans. When we’re not killing them, we do not exist.”

She pulled free from him to rub her hands along the sides of his face. She moved his face closer and kissed him.

Eyes shut, she listened to her own breath coming hard. She murmured under the strength of the kiss. Her senses felt along the length of her body, waiting for his caress, looking for it on her breasts, between her legs. She tasted salt from tears; whether they were her own or his, she did not know.

She moved the kiss upward and pulled his lip between her teeth. He sighed. She felt heat.

“We’re not alive, Fedya,” she whispered. “We’re not here in these bodies even though we feel them.”

Tania searched again for his touch on her body. She reached into his lap and moved one of his hands up to her chest. She squeezed her fingers around his, against her breast.

“Make love to me, Fedya.”

His hands were on her, one at her breast, the other on her stomach. She inhaled. A tightness in her loins came as if from outside, from above. She began to rise off the bed.

He pushed her away. “Tania. No.”

She opened her eyes, disoriented and swaying. She put her hands on his shoulders to push herself erect. Fedya lowered his arms while she gained control over her balance, away from him.

“Tania, no,” he said again, looking up. “It’s not…”

Her arms flew from her sides. “It’s not what? What’s wrong?”

Fedya got off the bed and stepped to face a wall. She sat in his place on the squeaking bed.

“Fedya, what’s the matter?”

He rubbed the wall with his boot and said nothing.

Tania sat on her hands. The bed squeaked again. She thought angrily about the noise they could have made on those springs.

“Fine,” she said, “don’t talk to me. Talk to that wall. If you want to stay up and guard me, go ahead. I’m going to sleep.”

Fedya leaned his back against the wall.

“It’s not right,” he said. “We shouldn’t do this.” He motioned to the corner where her coat and boots lay.

“Shouldn’t do what?” She pulled her hands from beneath her and slapped them down in her lap. “Shouldn’t make love? Here? On a battlefield? Is there something sacred about a battlefield?” She looked out the window at the blasted world. “Where else do we have, Fedya? This is it.”

Fedya moved in front of her. “I don’t agree with you. I don’t feel like you do, that I’m dead, like I don’t exist. But you! You act like you don’t care what happens to you, like there’s nothing left of you for them to kill.”

He pointed in the direction of the enemy lines. “Look at the chances you take! I remember you on the barge. You had to sit in the most dangerous spot. You wouldn’t move. Then after three hours in the water and six more in a sewer, you walk me straight into a Nazi mess tent! You screamed at a patrol of Germans… in Ukrainian or something, I don’t even know what that was! And your idea of a precaution is to tell me to babble like a moron in case we get stopped. Great plan! Is every American that insane?”

As Fedya stomped back and forth, waving his arms, she resisted the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. He’s right, of course, she thought. But dear Fedya, he never loses his charm. Even in the sewer, afraid of the dark and the shit. Even now, here, afraid of me.

His pacing covered the short distance between walls in a few strides. He flapped his arms at every turn. Tania looked into her lap to hide her smile. He looked like a giant mad goose.

“I don’t think you put enough thought into these things,” he said. “You act like you’re invisible. That may be fine for you, but remember I’m right there behind you and I don’t want to get killed in a Nazi mess tent! They don’t give medals for that!”

He looked at the ceiling. “Oh, and I just can’t wait for tonight to get here!” He spun on his heels, raised his arms high and held them there. “Tonight, I finally get to crawl behind you across a no-man’s-land that is probably a minefield, worrying about who’s more likely to shoot me, the Russians or the Germans! But first we get to make love as if it’s something we ordered off a menu, like it doesn’t matter at all. It’s wrong, Tania. It’s wrong to act as if things don’t matter when they really do.”

Fedya lowered his arms. He sat at her feet and shook his head, holding her eyes with his own. “I don’t think I was ready for this. I joined the Red Army because Stalin said so, because, let’s face it, it was the only thing possible. I trained for four weeks and then got on a transport. I ended up crossing the Volga in the water, holding on to a piece of a boat. I’m not like you. I didn’t come to this war by choice. I didn’t live with the partisans for a year. I’m scared of everything. Yuri dying in the sewer like that, that mess tent with Germans all over the place… You’re wrong, Tania. This has been some day. And it mattered to me because it scared the shit out of me. Not that anyone would have noticed even if I had shit all over myself!”

He rubbed a finger behind his ear, looking away from her. “I’m not used to this. You might be, but I’m not.”

She took Fedya’s hand from behind his ear and pulled him onto the bed. She laid his hand high on her thigh. She put the top of her head against his cheek, nuzzling him with her hair.

“Are you used to this?” She rubbed his hand, feeling his veins, his fingernails. She pressed his hand higher on her thigh.

“I’m from Moscow, Tania. This is the one thing we’re all used to there.”

“Well,” she whispered, “I’m in New York. It’s so much smaller than Moscow, it’s easy to get lost there. Why don’t you lead me again for a while?”

She whispered into the ear hovering at her mouth. “Go on, Fedushka. Lead me. I’ll take over when we get to the minefield.”

Fedya whispered in return. She felt the warmth of his words on her throat.

“The minefield, Tanyushka?” he whispered. “Too late. I’m already in the middle of it.”

FEDYA WAS WRONG. THE RAIL YARD HAD NOT BEEN MINED. Crawling in the darkness, Tania felt ahead with her fingers for detonator spikes, black barbs that would stick out of the earth only a centimeter. She found none.

She slid along the ground in as straight a line as the terrain allowed. She stopped at the hulk of a German tank. One of its treads had been blown off by an antitank rifle, further evidence for Tania to believe the Red Army was in the building in front of them. If not, the Germans surely would have towed this tank away and repaired the tread.

She and Fedya rested beneath the tank. They were halfway across the yard to the gray building rising out of the night, with another four hundred meters to go.

Tania was not worried about crossing the distance. The evening was quiet and dark. No flares scratched the sky. There was plenty of debris to slither behind. But she knew there were eyes behind and in front of her, sights fixed across the rail yard staring at each other in suspicion and hatred, watching for any activity. Her main concern was their first encounter with the Russians. They would be in the forward trenches, guarding their fortress from nighttime infiltrators. Like Fedya and her.

Tania lay still until her strength returned. Fedya’s breathing eased long before her own did. He’s powerful, she thought, recalling his strength in the sewer, his embrace on the dusty mattress.

Tania crawled from the cover of the tank. She led Fedya over more tracks and under rail cars to within seventy-five meters of the building. With the walls towering above them, Fedya pulled on her foot and dragged himself beside her.

“Now what?” he whispered.

“I don’t know.”

Fedya rolled his eyes into his brows. He laid his forehead on the backs of his hands in the dirt.

Tania stared up at the building. She scoured the ground, examining every bump and mound for the defense works and Red Army guards she knew were there. To surprise those guards in the dark would be fatal. To be caught in no-man’s-land at sunup before they could make themselves known as Russians would also be certain death.

She touched the top of Fedya’s head. “Stay here.”

“What? Where are you going?” His head jerked up. “Tania?”

She pushed his head back down onto his hands. “Keep this down if you want to keep this.”

Tania stood. She raised her hands over her head.

“Nicht schiessen!” she called out, walking forward, away from Fedya. “Nicht schiessen, bitte!” Don’t shoot!

The night calm was splintered by rifle chambers slamming shut. She knew the barrels were aimed at her heart.

She cried again, “Nicht schiessen!”

Russian voices called out from the debris twenty meters ahead. “Who’s there? Identify yourself.”

She inhaled to answer. Her lips formed the first sound in Russian. Ya Russkaya. I’m Russian. Then she stopped herself. She stepped carefully.

“Nicht schiessen, bitte,” she called to the voices.

With a clatter, a dark shape leaped out of the ground and ran to her. The soldier seized her roughly, grabbing down one of her raised arms. Tania allowed herself to be pulled and then tossed over the lip of a trench. She tumbled onto the dirt floor.

A kicking boot rolled her onto her back. A rifle barrel was thrust into her throat, pressed hard there, making her gasp.

‘Who the fuck are you?” a shadow demanded.

He was joined by two others with rifles ready. “Talk!”

Another voice said angrily, “Spreche!”

Tania kept still, moving only her lips.

“I’m Russian. The 284th. My transport was blown up. last night crossing the Volga. I floated downriver behind the lines.”

The gun pressed deeper into her throat. Hands felt along her arms and legs, frisking her for weapons.

“How do you know German?”

Tania’s voice gurgled. “I was a partisan in Byeloruss. We had to learn a little German.”

The gun eased at her throat. She took a breath and cleared her throat. “Not like you Ivan dicks who only know how to sleep on guard and throw women around.”

One of the voices laughed. The gun was taken away.

“The 284th?”

“Yes. Under Batyuk.”

A soldier leaned down. She heard sniffing.

“Damn, what is that smell?”

Tania laughed. Fedya’s armor, she thought.

“It’s shit. I’ve got it all over me. It’s a long story.”

“Don’t tell me.” The soldier reached down to help Tania off the floor of the trench.

“Sorry,” he said. “We didn’t know who you were. All I saw was someone stand up right in front of me and shout in German. I thought you were an infiltrator.”

Tania looked at the three soldiers. The hard treatment was no less than she’d expected.

“If I’d been an infiltrator, would I have called to you in Russian or German?”

Two of the three answered after a moment of considering in the dark trench. “Russian.” The third nodded.

Tania smiled at her guess. Another chance I took. I’ll hear about this one from Fedya, too.

She told the soldiers about leaving Fedya lying in the dirt twenty meters away. She called to him.

“Fedya, it’s all right. Come in. We’re back!”

He scrambled to the trench and was frisked as soon as he tumbled down.

Tania did not approach him. “Comrade Michailov,” she said.

“Comrade Chernova.” He nodded to her, then shook hands with the soldiers, smiling, thanking each of them for not shooting at them. “Good job,” he said. “Nice work. Excellent.”

Tania turned to the men. “Could you help us get some clean clothes? And a meal?”

One of the guards stepped forward. “Clean clothes will have to wait until morning. We can’t leave our posts. As for the meal…”

The soldier reached into his coat to pull out a flask of vodka. He handed it first to Fedya.

“Welcome to Stalingrad.”

EIGHT

“EVERYONE ON YOUR FEET, LET’S GO!”

Viktor Medvedev walked into the huge shop bay. Thirty soldiers jumped up from their seats on the scattered bins, barrels, and crates.

The high brick walls of the massive basement glowed with the salmon light of dawn. Once a machine shop for the Lazur chemical plant, the room’s heavy machinery had been evacuated across the Volga in early summer, leaving a gray expanse of bare floor. Like all the large buildings in Stalingrad, the Lazur had been reduced by the Luftwaffe’s bombings to scorched steel and cinder block until it could neither fall apart nor burn more. The Red Army had burrowed into the rubble of the Lazur and the wreckage in the rail yard surrounding the plant. The basement had survived intact beneath the mounds of collapsed brick and girders above. This morning the late October chill spilled through shattered windows high overhead. The room was quiet, its vast emptiness devouring sound.

The thirty soldiers standing before Viktor were the first sniper volunteers from the 284th. Commissar Igor Danilov had told the Hare and the Bear he wanted to limit the school’s first class to soldiers from their own division, to encourage other divisions to start sniper initiatives.

Most of the volunteers had read about the formation of the sniper unit and the exploits of Chief Master Sergeant Zaitsev in the flimsy news sheet In Our Country’s Defense, put out twice a week by the Communists to the defenders of Stalingrad.

Viktor stubbed out a cigarette and began.

“You are all here for one purpose only. You will learn to be snipers to kill Germans.”

The Bear held up a rifle with a telescopic sight. “No matter what your battle experience has been before today, fighting as a sniper will be different. You’ll need skills beyond those of an infantry soldier. You’ll need greater intelligence and discipline. You will no longer be part of a thousand-man battalion doing only what you’re told. You will be snipers, acting on your own impulse. You must think, then move, then act. If you don’t, you’ll be killed. That I guarantee you.”

Viktor stepped closer to the front row of recruits.

“This unit is the first of its kind. Until now the Russian sniper has been a brave but largely disorganized and ineffective tool. We have served well, but we can serve better. Over the next several days you will learn how to hunt down your opponent. You will kill him in his own lair with the silence and terror of distance. You will strike at him in his most vulnerable moments: while he smokes his morning cigarette, when he takes a piss, scooping his evening beans and horse meat into his mouth. You’ll kill him when he makes the smallest misstep. Fear will haunt him every moment, the fear of wearing the silent brand of our crosshairs. He won’t know when the bullet is coming for him or the man next to him. But he will know there is no safe ground for him in Russia. That is your charge.”

Viktor raised the weapon. “Your telescopic site will bring your prey close. You will stalk and watch the enemy, perhaps for hours or days at a time. You’ll see his face, see his teeth, watch his head explode.”

The Bear lowered the rifle. “This type of killing must be done with patience and without heat. This is cold death. You will know the man you’re putting a bullet into.”

Viktor sat on an empty crate. He laid the rifle across his knees as if resting an oar from rowing.

Through the shop door came Zaitsev, his footsteps clicking on the concrete. He cast his eyes over the recruits, continuing the scrutiny he’d begun outside the doorway, listening to Viktor’s opening remarks. Six of the soldiers in the room he already knew: Baugderis, Shaikin, Morozor, the giant Griasev, Kostikev, and little Kulikov. In the past few days, he’d asked each personally to join the sniper unit after seeing them in action. He’d met Baugderis, Shaikin, and Kostikev while hunting on Mamayev Kurgan, watching the three, all farm boys from Tbilisi in Georgia, calmly drop Nazis at two hundred meters using only open sights. Viktor had found Griasev, a mammoth with arms and hands like jackhammers, at the Tractor Factory, throwing grenades over fifty meters with alarming accuracy, an unheard-of feat. Kostikev was a Siberian from Zaitsev’s company in the 284th. He was as skilled with a stiletto as with a rifle and was the calmest man Zaitsev had seen in close combat. And Zaitsev had spent hours watching tiny Nikolay Kulikov at the Barricades Plant crawl a dozen times under enemy fire to bring supplies to a squad pinned down in a trench.

This first class of volunteers looked gritty and battle-hardened. Their sizes ranged from the hulking Griasev to a short and flabby Armenian woman, one of two women in the group.

“My name is Chief Master Sergeant Vasily Zaitsev. I am your instructor. I am assisted by Master Sergeant Viktor Medvedev.” Viktor raised his cigarette in the air. “And of course by Commissar Danilov.” Zaitsev smiled at the commissar, but the man scribbling against the wall did not look up.

“Your sniper training will last three days. Today we will discuss weapons, fieldcraft, and tactics. Tomorrow we’ll teach you to aim and shoot with a rifle and scope. On the third day you will each be sent on a mission. Those of you who live to the fourth day will be reassigned to your companies as snipers.” Zaitsev turned on his heels. “Viktor.”

The Bear rose from the crate and snatched up two rifles. Screwed to the tops of both weapons were telescopic sights. Stopping in front of the trainees, he laid one of the guns down.

“When you came into this room this morning, each of you was told to leave your old rifle in the hall. Those rifles will be given to the infantry. You will be issued new weapons tonight.”

Viktor surveyed the soldiers’ faces. No one looked away. The Bear commanded attention. “I understand that two of you actually came in without any weapons at all.” Viktor shook his head and smiled. “You two must be very dangerous fighters.”

The group laughed with Viktor. He held up one rifle.

“This is the weapon of your enemy. The Mauser Kar 98K. It has been fitted with a four-power scope and fires an eight-millimeter load. This rifle is a piece of shit that can kill you.”

Viktor snapped the stock against his shoulder. In a flash, he leveled the barrel at a private ten meters in front of him. The soldier recoiled, then gained his composure and sat up.

Viktor nestled in behind the scope, wrinkling his face to aim. “The optics are poor, with a limited field of vision. The scope has a cross reticle, which in my opinion worsens the sense of roaming. The balance of the weapon is pitiful. It jams frequently, and the gas system can fail in cold weather.”

He pulled the rifle’s trigger. The hammer clicked. Instantly, without lowering the rifle from his cheek, he levered the bolt, pretending to chamber another round.

“The bolt is well located right above the trigger for fast reloading. The average Nazi sniper can get off two shots in four-point-five seconds with this rifle.”

Viktor let the Mauser fall with a clatter. With his foot, he shoved it away to send it skidding against a wall.

The Bear picked up the second rifle. He held it over his head with both hands.

“This,” he said, spinning the rifle like a baton, “is also the weapon of your enemy. It’s the Russian Moisin-Nagant model 91/30 sniper rifle with a four-power scope. It fires a seven-point-six-two-caliber load, is reliable under all combat conditions, especially the cold, and is the weapon of choice for both Russian and German snipers.”

The trainees smiled at Viktor. The Bear did not smile back. “Your job,” he said, “is to not die and let these rifles fall into the enemy’s hands. Let them keep using their German shit. These are Russian guns. Understand?”

Viktor again jerked the rifle up under his chin. He trained it at the head of the same recruit. The private, surprised for the second time, leaned away from the barrel, then righted himself again, embarrassed.

“Excellent optics, with a post and sidebar reticle, leaving the top of the field of vision open. The scope has internal windage and elevation adjustments. It’s also mounted high enough above the barrel for you to see under it and use the open sight for shots under one hundred meters. The rifle is nicely balanced but a few grams heavier than the Mauser.”

Viktor lowered the rifle, smiling now at the young soldier who’d been in his sights. “What the hell,” he said, “we’re Russians. We can carry it.”

Viktor brought the weapon into firing position, again at the selected private, who this time sat stolidly. Viktor pulled the trigger, then slammed the bolt in and out without lowering the gun from his cheek. He squeezed the trigger again.

“It has one design flaw,” he said, holding the rifle at his chest. “The bolt is too far forward for fast repeat firing. The average Russian sniper can fire two shots five to five and a half seconds apart. That means your first shot had better hit, because your enemy is going to be a second faster with the next bullet.”

He tucked the Moisin-Nagant under his arm. “You will all be issued this rifle later today.” Then Viktor turned his back to the trainees. “Vasha.”

Zaitsev rose from the crate. He handed over his half-smoked cigarette in exchange for the Russian rifle. Zaitsev looked over at Danilov. The commissar remained bent over his notebook; he flipped to a new page, then shook out the fingers on his writing hand.

Zaitsev hefted the weapon. He walked up to the private who had jerked twice under Medvedev’s aim. The soldier was seated with five others on a metal pipe.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

The private began to stand for his answer. Zaitsev motioned him to stay seated.

“What’s your name?”

“Chekov, Chief Master Sergeant. Anatoly Petrovich.”

Zaitsev looked at the small rips in Chekov’s uniform, the scruffiness of his boots. The man’s eyes showed no fear. His lips were tight, his breathing was even.

“You’ve seen some action, Private?”

Chekov’s eyes narrowed. His jaw muscles flexed.

“Yes.”

“Did you hunt as a civilian, Chekov?”

“Yes. I was a poacher. In the Ukraine.”

Zaitsev’s eyebrows went up. A poacher? This is what I get for letting Danilov write the requirements for me. Well, this is no time to judge. He nodded and moved down the line, asking for names, sometimes homes, and if they’d been hunters. Or poachers.

“Vasilchenko. Um, yes, I did poach some.”

“Druiker, from Estonia. I preferred fishing. But I can handle a rifle. You’ll see.”

“Volvivatek. Outside Kishinev in Moldavia. Hunted every day until I was drafted. Best turkey shot in my village.”

“Slepkinian, from Armenia,” answered a dark, thick-legged woman. “My husband was crippled in the factory years ago. I had to learn to hunt to feed my children.”

Peasants, thought Zaitsev, like me. We’re all peasants. All the better. Accustomed to hardship.

Zaitsev stepped before a tall, lithe blond girl. He noted her stare. This, he thought, is no peasant.

“Chernova,” she said.

The large young man standing next to her called out his name even before Zaitsev could move away from the girl.

“Michailov, Fyodor Ivanovich. From Moscow.”

Zaitsev looked at the two. Both appeared freshly scrubbed compared to the ruggedness of the rest of the group.

“Your uniforms are new. When did you arrive in Stalingrad?”

The youth spoke quickly; it seemed he was answering for both himself and the girl. “Two days ago. Our transport was sunk on the Volga. We… um…” He paused, looking straight ahead, “Our uniforms were… um…”

Zaitsev said, “You’re the ones who fell into the shit.”

Viktor chuckled, rubbing his forehead into his hand.

Zaitsev looked at Fyodor Ivanovich Michailov. The boy was as big as Viktor. “It’s all right, Private,” he said. “It’s just that stories like that one get around quickly. You’re actually quite brave.” Zaitsev looked at the girl. “Both of you,” he added, smiling.

Zaitsev stepped to the middle of the floor, the Moisin-Nagant under his arm.

Well, he thought, now would seem to be a good time to start playing the hero. He spoke loudly, snipping the words off short the way Viktor did.

“Before we begin, I want to tell you something Comrade Danilov has not yet managed to put into print.”

The commissar looked up from his pad like an animal hearing a curious sound. Hurriedly, he turned to a fresh page and bore down with his pen.

Zaitsev continued. “I want each of you to know why I have accepted the assignment to teach you. It’s because I view you as my revenge. If I die in battle, yours will be the bullets I’ll still fire at the Nazis. I’ll fight them from my grave through you.”

He paused to look over the intent faces of the recruits. “Each of you,” he repeated, his voice solemn. He waved his open palm across the trainees as if in benediction.

“Each of you must know your own reason for being here, as I know mine. It will keep you alive.”

Zaitsev extended the rifle to the poacher Chekov. The private took it, and Zaitsev held it with him for a moment.

“And it will make you die very, very dearly,” he said. He released the rifle into the man’s grasp.

The room was silent save for the echoes of Zaitsev’s voice and the flipping of paper while Danilov whisked to a new sheet.

THE REMAINDER OF THAT MORNING WAS SPENT ON WHAT Zaitsev and Viktor called “fieldcraft.”

Viktor presented the topic to the recruits in a simple fashion: field-craft was nothing more than hunting, right up to the point of pulling the trigger. The skills of silence and unseen movement were the most important abilities a sniper could develop. “Your shooting eye will improve with practice,” he told them, “but missing a shot at three hundred fifty meters will never get you killed so long as your enemy doesn’t know where you are.

“Stalingrad is not the forests or wheat fields of your homes. It’s a giant pile of bricks, concrete, and metal. Hunting Germans in Stalingrad is not the same as hunting squirrels on the farm. Squirrels don’t shoot back. To survive and kill in this city, you’ll need new ways to move and hide. You must learn to use the ruins and craters, to run bent over with your head almost to your knees. We’ll practice crawling and dragging your weapon in a sack behind you. Picking your routes through the debris requires a keen eye and patience. Most important—and this is something you may already know if you’re really hunters—you must lie still for hours until the one shot presents itself. A move made too soon can be your last.”

Viktor and Zaitsev led the recruits up the steps out of the basement to the first floor of the Lazur. Collapsed walls and ceiling joists formed a huge, jumbled wasteland. For four hours the two sergeants watched and shouted while the trainees crawled over and around the wreckage, dragging mock rifle sacks behind them. Whenever a head or shoulder popped above the debris, Viktor shouted “Bang! Dead Ivan! Now get down!”

The smaller recruits were better at escaping detection in the ruins. Many of the bigger ones, like Griasev and the freshman Michailov, bumped and jangled their way through the rubble.

To take advantage of these differences, as well as minimize the risks, Zaitsev divided the class into two teams. One squad, the “hares,” would come under his tutelage. The hares would be the shorter, more slender soldiers, like Zaitsev himself, who could move undetected in the debris. Viktor’s group would be the “bears,” the larger men who needed extra instruction on how to keep their heads down and their feet from fouling each other’s ropes but possessed greater physical strength.

In the late morning they ate a lunch of tea, soup, and bread. The hares and bears sat separate, as units, talking and laughing. Members of each group produced bottles of vodka.

Danilov approached Zaitsev, carrying sheafs of notes.

“Comrade Zaitsev,” Danilov began, offering a cigarette, “tell me. What do you think of our new heroes?”

Zaitsev accepted the cigarette. “The women.”

“You object to the presence of women in our sniper school?”

“They’ll create problems among the men. They always do.”

“Well, Vasily, let’s see if you can’t teach them to cause more problems for the Germans than for us.” Danilov laid his notes aside. “You understand why it must be done this way. In the Red Army, there are tens of thousands of women serving alongside the men, on radios in the bunkers, stanching the men’s blood as nurses, and working the artillery. This first sniper unit gives us the opportunity to tell the world that the Nazis are being defeated on the battlefield not just by Russian men but by the Russian people, all of them, men and women. We can say we have risen to fight as one. The Communist order is truly united, without distinction by class or sex. Think of the impact at home among the civilians to see pictures in Red Star of their sisters, armed and dangerous. Not even the Americans can claim that their women are shooting down their enemies with rifles.”

Zaitsev ground his cigarette beneath his heel.

“I have less objection to your decision than the fact that I was not consulted,” he said. “Please do Viktor and me the courtesy of asking our opinions in the future. For now, we’ll make your women into killers.” If they’re not already, Zaitsev thought, walking away from the commissar. The Armenian one, Slepkinian, though heavy, moved well and claimed she was an experienced hunter. Viktor had told him about the blonde, Chernova. The Bear had shared a bottle with the guards who’d brought her and the big boy, Michailov, in from the trenches on the edge of no-man’s-land. She said she’d been a partisan from Byelorussia. When she’d heard the Lazur plant was to be the site of the new sniper school, she insisted on being among the first trainees.

What has she seen? There’s so little news from the occupied areas. I’ve heard it’s hard there, terrible. Is she a solid fighter, the guerrilla’s reputation, or just able to mount a good stare on that pretty face? We’ll find out.

Zaitsev looked at Chernova, sitting with the men. Her spoon was tucked into her boot like a regular foot soldier. She took a gulp of vodka and finished by inhaling through her sleeve. The men enjoyed her. They ignored the other, thicker woman.

He stopped his walk among the men and watched only her. Even clapping his hands to break up lunch and move on with the lessons, she tugged at his attention. Her voice rose above the others. She was behind him, standing, her hands on her hips. Ignore her, he thought.

Trouble.

ZAITSEV WALKED TO THE BASE OF THE CINDER-BLOCK WALL. He turned his back to the recruits, most of whom sat cross-legged in a semicircle on the shop floor. Late afternoon light flowed through the high, broken windows. Overhead, swirling dust glittered like mica.

“Out there”—Zaitsev pointed to the window above him—”it’s sometimes very quiet. That silence can be deceiving. It can lull you into carelessness.”

He walked to the middle of the group.

“Remember, you’re not just infantry anymore. You’re snipers. You need new habits, new ways of thinking. A foot soldier’s battles are fought with noise and explosions, screaming and shouting and rushing around. You will fight in silence. Just because it’s quiet around your trench or your shooting cell, don’t think you’re alone. There are arms, legs, and eyes everywhere in the ruins. Every building, every destroyed house, every pile of rubble is under watch. Supply units are running through trenches carrying ammo, mines, and food. From the tops of buildings, artillery observers are training their binoculars in all directions. Sappers crawl through the debris to find enemy bunkers and tunnels. Runners from headquarters are carrying messages to units trapped without radios. Never forget: the battlefield is alive with activity, even when you can’t hear it or see it. And you, the sniper, will lie in the middle of it all, unseen, unheard, watching everything, letting it pass you by until it’s time to strike.”

He paused. Every eye was on him. The soldiers craned for his next words.

Zaitsev looked at Danilov. The commissar’s pencil wiggled madly, recording these first sessions of the new Red Army sniper school. Vasily Zaitsev, head sniper, Danilov must be writing. Hero.

“As a Russian sniper, you’ll have the following duties when you return to your units. You will hunt the most important targets you can find in this order: officers, artillery observers, scouts, mortar crews and machine gunners, antitank riflemen, and motorcycle messengers. Never give up your position for a shot on a lesser target if you think an officer will come your way with a little more patience.

“Your company commanders will assign your platoon leader the day’s objective. You will advance to the front line and spearhead the attack by taking out the targets I just named in that order. After the attack has begun, you’ll move to the flanks to protect against machine guns and mortars.”

Zaitsev paused to let what he’d said sink in, though he knew he would have to repeat it several times before the day was out.

He rubbed his hands together. “Like the wolf in the taiga, the Red sniper has only one natural enemy.” He said this as if sharing a secret with fellow conspirators. “Your counterpart is the German sniper. He is your nemesis and you are his. Despite the list of targets I gave you, an enemy sniper is always a priority.”

He smiled at the Bear, who stood behind the men, smoking and looking into the distance as if across a great open span.

“Nothing,” Zaitsev said, reaching for the Moisin-Nagant to bring the sight up to his eye, “absolutely nothing will excite you and endanger you like a duel to the death with another sniper.”

Zaitsev squeezed the trigger. It clicked in the quiet chamber. “He is your worthiest opponent.”

Viktor spat on the concrete floor and rubbed it in with his foot. He stepped to the middle of the group and stood next to Zaitsev. The two linked arms.

“And we’re going to show you how to kill him,” Viktor said.

Zaitsev patted his large friend on the back. “One bullet,” he said, “one kill.”

THAT AFTERNOON, THE RECRUITS STUDIED WHAT ZAITSEV AND VIKTOR had learned about enemy sniper tactics and abilities. It had become clear that the Nazi sharpshooters were not trained for the urban devastation of Stalingrad but rather for operations as part of their blitzkrieg tactics. They were accustomed to moving fast and furiously across open fields and around deserted, bombed-out cities. Where do you learn patience, Viktor wondered aloud, when you’re simply running behind tanks, conquering whole nations at once, like Poland in a month or the useless, gutless French in a week?

The Germans made good use of darkening agents such as grease or dirt to deflect light and blend with their surroundings. They wrapped their muzzles with light or dark cloth. On one occasion, both Viktor and Zaitsev were fooled by a Nazi sniper who’d set up a false position by linking a wire to a rifle, then pulled his trigger from twenty meters away. Zaitsev had fired at the position, certain he had a kill. His reward was a bullet skipped off his helmet and a hard fall onto the seat of his pants.

The German snipers’ shooting skills were lethal to five hundred meters. Though deadly, the snipers could also be careless and overconfident, often neglecting to move after a shot. They didn’t husband their ammunition, sometimes firing two or three rounds at a single target from the same position, presenting a patient Red sniper with the chance to repay a miss with a hit. The Nazis frequently repeated deceptions, bouncing a helmet on a stick high above the breastwork three or four times an hour as if the Russian sniper were nothing more than a fish that would bite on any worm. At times Viktor had felt insulted by the Germans. They would smoke cigarettes or pipes after dark or throw dirt into the open while digging a shooting cell. They sometimes made unnecessary movements or noises. “Never rely on your adversary to make a mistake,” Zaitsev told the recruits. “But give him plenty of room to do so. Then punish him for it.”

Viktor reminded them: “No mistake is small if it gets your head blown off.”

The German sniper worked in relative safety, usually two to three hundred meters from the front line. His four-hundred-meter shot would therefore penetrate only a hundred or so meters into the Russian rear. This tactic posed little threat to Red Army officers, who stayed mostly far behind the lines. But the new Russian sharpshooter, with his greater fieldcraft skills, would prowl under the enemy’s nose along the front lines to reach an inattentive German colonel or general half a kilometer behind the action. “Because of this bold fact, even our women snipers,” Zaitsev said, “will make better men.”

The Nazi sharpshooters never worked at night, allowing the Russians to operate twelve hours a day without fear of being spotted. “I don’t like hunting after dark,” Zaitsev commented, but added with a laugh, “though Master Sergeant Medvedev is quite the night owl.” Viktor regularly took his toll on enemy machine gunners imprudent enough to fire tracers, or on artillery spotters who fancied the green and red flares they lofted above the Russian flotillas on the Volga.

Zaitsev believed the fiercer conditions under which the Russians worked kept them sharp. By contrast, the German snipers’ concentration was eroded by working exclusively from the rear and only under the sun. As an added benefit, the Red troops on the front line got a morale boost from fighting alongside their marksmen. The German foot soldier never saw his army’s snipers.

“The Nazi snipers think they’re safe just because they’re in trenches far behind the lines,” Zaitsev said. “They are not safe, even there. Why? Because they’re still in Russia.”

That’s enough for today, Zaitsev thought. I don’t know what else to tell them. In fact, I didn’t know I knew so much myself.

Zaitsev glanced across the room at Danilov. Incredibly, the commissar had scribbled all morning and afternoon. Danilov looked up to meet Zaitsev’s eyes. He closed his notebook and gave the OK sign. With both hands, he held up the notebook with satisfaction as if it were a trophy he’d won. Danilov hurried from the shop with his long coattails kicking up like dogs running at his sides.

Zaitsev clapped his hands. “Everyone up. We’ll start tomorrow with marksmanship. For now, the hares will come with me. The bears will go with Sergeant Medvedev. We’ll show you to your quarters. Let’s go.”

Fifteen recruits followed each of the sergeants up to the ground floor of the Lazur to separate corners of the building. Once the decision had been made to divide them, Zaitsev and Viktor wanted distinct identities for the two squads, with military objectives that best fit their physical abilities and personalities, and Danilov had approved of the idea. The bears would work more closely with the frontline troops, softening up resistance before attacks and protecting the 284th’s flanks during operations. Their weapons, in addition to the sniper rifle, would include the submachine gun and grenade. These large men would also be trained in night sniping operations, Viktor’s specialty. On the other hand, the hares were to be the division’s assassins, smaller, more mobile men—and women—with the nerve and fieldcraft, in Viktor’s words, to “crawl into the enemy’s mouth and shoot out his teeth.” The hares would learn Zaitsev’s abilities at dissolving into the front line with iron patience and unerring one-shot killing.

Zaitsev ushered his group into a large, windowless room with a blanket hanging in the doorway. A lantern glowed in a corner. Three buckets of water sat next to a tin washbasin. Beyond these, the room was empty.

“Dinner will be brought in a few hours. Get to know each other, because soon you’ll be teaming up.”

On the way out of the plant, Zaitsev met Viktor.

“What do you think?” the Bear asked when they had ducked into a trench behind the shelter of the huge building. The sun was almost down. The shadows were gone; an edgy chill crept from the ground. Zaitsev knew Viktor’s routine: he’d return to their bunker, eat a hurried snack, read a few articles in today’s In Our Country’s Defense or Red Star, take a nap, and head into the night.

Zaitsev looked at his friend. “Well,” he said, “before the first shot is fired, it’s hard to tell. But I can tell you I’m glad I’m not a German.”

“That’s good.” Viktor bent low to walk beneath the lip of the trench. Such a big man, Zaitsev thought. Not built well for this sniper business. How does he do it?

Zaitsev laughed. “I’m goddammed glad I’m not a bear, either.”

Viktor grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it at Zaitsev’s back. The Hare ran full tilt through the trench all the way back to their bunker, with the Bear growling at his heels.

NINE

MINUTES BEFORE MIDNIGHT, ZAITSEV ENTERED THE HARES’ QUARTERS.

“How are my rabbits?” His lantern threw amber shades against their blinking faces.

The recruits sat up on their bedrolls. Good, Zaitsev thought. They can sleep. An important skill for a sniper. Rest when and where you can.

He crouched. “I have a mission.” Dark tendrils of shadow played on their faces when he lowered the lamp to the floor. “After school was out today, division headquarters sent me orders. It seems some Nazi prisoners have pinpointed a German forward HQ. Command asked if I could take some snipers, set up positions on no-man’s-land, and see if we couldn’t get lucky with a few shots in the morning. I told them yes, we could do that, but I had a better idea. Why drill holes in just a few Nazi officers? Why not take care of them all at once?”

Little Chekov spoke up. “Dynamite ‘em.”

Zaitsev pointed at the private. “Trainee Chekov gets a star. Exactly. I’ll take four of you with me. We leave immediately. I have the satchel charges assembled, and I’ve got a map of the location. Volunteers?”

All hands went up. Some recruits got to their knees to raise their hands higher. Zaitsev tapped on the heads of the soldiers he wanted on the mission: Chekov, the poacher, a superb shot and intelligent; Kostikev, the silent Siberian killer; Kulikov, the most quiet and vigilant crawler in the class, who could literally blend with the rubble; and the resistance fighter, Chernova.

Each stood and walked to the doorway. Zaitsev turned to those remaining. “Get some sleep. You’ll all have your chances. We’ll be back before sunup.”

The four followed Zaitsev out into the dark October hush. The nervous crackle of a far-off rifle or a machine gun’s burst were the only noises to upset the chilly stillness. Zaitsev walked beside the high wall, holding his lantern low, The shadows of his squad lagged on the wall behind them.

Zaitsev put the lamp down. Waiting in a heap beside the wall were six backpacks and five regular-issue rifles. From his pocket, Zaitsev produced a greasepaint pot.

“Grease up,” he told them. Chekov dug out a gob with two fingers and passed the pot around.

They darkened their hands and faces while Zaitsev spread his map beside the hissing light. He stabbed his finger onto the paper.

“This is the Lazur. Here are the outbuildings of the Red October plant. There,” he said, and pointed again, “is the Stalingrad Flying School. And here between the two is a row of ice warehouses. In this one, on the top floor, is the German HQ.”

He ran his finger along the map across the northern portion of the rail yard, which engulfed the Lazur on three sides. “We’ll crawl north across no-man’s-land. Our outposts are here and here. They’ve been alerted so that we don’t get shot in the backsides. We’ll enter the building from the south, climb to the third floor, plant our charges, light them, and get out.”

He looked up from the map at the shiny black faces and white eyes of the recruits. All were looking down to study the layout—all except Chernova, who stared at him. He smiled at her.

“Clean as you please, partisan. Right?”

“Right.”

“Let’s do it.” Zaitsev folded the map. “Each of you take a rifle and a satchel. You’re carrying the dynamite. I’m carrying the fuses.” He hoisted two of the packs over his shoulder. “If anything happens to me, make sure you take my packs.”

He put out the lamp and left it beside the wall. He pulled Chekov beside him. “You know the way?”

The private nodded. “In the last two months I’ve spent a few years of my life in the Red October. I know all the ways there, Chief Master Sergeant. I know the icehouses, too.”

Zaitsev patted Chekov on the back. The soldier was shorter than him by half a head, and he had delicate features and black hair. Chekov possessed the confident manner of an athlete; he’ll make a good sniper, Zaitsev thought. He’s quirky, cool. He’ll be hard to predict.

“Good. You lead, Chekov.” Zaitsev touched Kostikev on the arm. “You next. If we meet trouble, you take care of it.”

The Siberian fingered the knives hanging from his belt, one near each hand. He said nothing but slung the rifle and satchel over his shoulder. He stepped close at Chekov’s back.

“Nikolay,” Zaitsev called to Kulikov. “If something happens to me, you’re in charge. I want you in the middle. Go.”

He turned to Chernova, her hair golden even in the night.

“You go in front of me, partisan. You’ll check the work to make sure the charges are set right. When we’re ready, you’ll light the fuse. Danilov will love that.”

The girl’s brows arched while she hefted her rifle. “Is that why I’m along? To be in one of Danilov’s articles about you?”

Zaitsev tugged on her arm. “Do your job well and it could be an article about you.”

The five soldiers walked in single file for a hundred meters to the north. At a signal from Zaitsev, they dropped into a trench leading to the edge of the rail yard. At the end of the trench, they were met by six guards posted behind heavy machine guns trained across no-man’s-land. With a nod to Chekov, Zaitsev sent the lithe point man over the breastwork and onto the three-hundred-meter-wide plain of cratered earth and twisting rails.

At ten-second intervals, Zaitsev motioned for the next in line to crawl out of the trench. “Stay in Chekov’s tracks.”

Once all four hares were in the rail yard, Zaitsev slung his satchels over his back and greased up his own face and hands. He cradled his rifle and climbed out of the trench, lifting an oiled, dark thumb to the guards.

Once on his belly, he could barely make out Chernova’s legs wriggling ten meters ahead. Neither she nor any of the other trainees made a sound.

For ten minutes, Zaitsev crawled in a crooked line, his eyes locked on Chernova’s heels. He grew irked at the zigs and zags Chekov led them through. But as the route proceeded through craters, beneath rail cars, and behind debris, Zaitsev smiled admiringly at the craft of Anatoly Chekov’s choices. Slow, patient, and silent.

A white flare shot up straight overhead. Zaitsev dug his chin into the dirt. Ahead of him, Chernova, Kulikov, and Kostikev were still as rocks. He was certain they were almost invisible against the dark, rippling dirt.

The flare twinkled and faded, riding a slow fall beneath a tiny parachute. Under the gleam of the drifting light, Zaitsev looked two hundred meters ahead to the huge outline of the Red October plant. Fifty meters to his right, almost astride their position, was the Stalingrad Flight School. Only forty meters more along this course until they would turn left; then the icehouse was just a short distance down that street.

The flare floated behind a row of ghostly ruins and extinguished itself. Zaitsev followed Chernova over the crest of a crater. The hares were there waiting for him.

Zaitsev pointed at a four-story building thirty meters away. The south wall of the building was missing. The stairwell to the upper floors was completely exposed to the outside.

Chekov nodded. The icehouse.

Zaitsev tapped Kostikev’s leg. “You go first. Leave your rifle and satchel here. Light a cigarette from the second-floor landing.”

Kostikev handed his pack to Chekov. Chernova took his rifle.

Kostikev pulled one of his knives from its sheath and gripped it in his mouth like a picture of a Turk pirate. He smiled at Zaitsev, his fellow Siberian, showing a flash of gold in his teeth. The stringy muscles in his neck stood out like buttresses under his jaw.

“See you in a minute,” he uttered around the knife. These were the first words Zaitsev had heard him speak all day.

Zaitsev settled on the rim of the crater to watch the man disappear into the rubble of the fallen wall. Minutes passed. Then, out of the shadows on the second-floor landing, a dark form walked to the ledge. The shape turned and shuffled around a corner without lighting a cigarette.

A minute later a second form appeared on the landing and lit a cigarette. It inhaled deeply, giving off a glowing dot of orange, then flicked the cigarette down onto the debris below to bounce once in a shower of sparks.

Zaitsev whispered, “Stay low to the building. Then up the stairs fast. No noise. Nikolay—move.”

Kulikov hefted his own rifle and Kostikev’s and slid out of the crater. Chekov grabbed Kostikev’s satchel and followed.

“Partisan,” Zaitsev hissed, “go.”

He waited until Chernova slid ahead of him with her rifle and backpack. He followed her over the rim of the crater.

He heard nothing, only the faintest scraping in the rocks from his scurrying hares. At the base of the steps, Kulikov squatted in the shadows, guarding. Zaitsev followed Chernova quickly up the steps, both on tiptoe. He looked out of the stairwell into the open air where a wall should have been. His heart pounded in his hands, which were clutching his rifle. He was unaccustomed to being so exposed in his hunting, as he was now in this stairwell. There was no camouflage, no trench, nothing to cloak him but silence and the gray-black night.

Two steps ahead, Chernova recoiled. She had just reached the top stair and stepped onto the second-floor landing. The girl stumbled back against Zaitsev. She fumbled to raise her gun.

He reached his arm up to the girl’s waist and pulled her down onto his step. He flipped his rifle over, stock first, and lunged forward, the rifle poised to strike.

There in the dark, standing against the wall, was a Nazi guard. His rifle was slung over his shoulder. His helmeted head stared out past the demolished wall. Zaitsev knew what had happened. It was what he’d ordered, but with a flourish. He rubbed his foot against the toe of the German’s boot and felt the slickness of blood on the landing.

Zaitsev reached under the chin and felt the haft of Kostikev’s knife. The Nazi had been tacked to a wooden timber in the wall with his head resting upright on the knife, his chin on the white bone handle.

Chernova stepped up on the landing. Kulikov arrived on the steps below. He’d hurried up from his post on the first floor at the slight sounds of the commotion on the landing.

Zaitsev heard a “psst” from the steps to the next floor. Kostikev’s gold teeth twinkled in the center of a loose grin.

“I had nowhere to put him, Vasha. I didn’t want you to trip over him.” The assassin shrugged, then climbed the steps.

“Guard the rear,” Zaitsev said to Chernova. “Tell Kulikov to bring up his satchel. I’ll come get you when the charges are laid.” He followed Kostikev up the steps.

On the third floor, Chekov led the others into the middle of a large, open room. Thick wooden pillars stood on the outer reaches of an ancient oak floor. This is an old building, Zaitsev observed. It’ll come down nicely.

They laid the four satchels in each corner. Kulikov hooked up the charges and fuses in the center of the room. Zaitsev’s watch read 2:50.

“Ready?” he whispered to Nikolay.

“One minute.”

Zaitsev crept down the steps to the second-floor landing. On his way, he heard not a whisper but a command.

“Hände hoch!”

His stomach tightened. Adrenaline needles welded his fists to his rifle stock. His lips curled in an unspoken curse. Chernova had been surprised by a Nazi on the stairwell, a guard Kostikev had missed. She was certainly at this moment staring down the barrel of a gun. The mission and all their lives were in jeopardy. The next five seconds would save them or lose them.

Zaitsev slipped down the steps quietly as he could. Reaching the turn, he peeked around the corner to the landing.

The soldier was frozen in place, his right arm extended to a pistol reaching at the girl’s head. Zaitsev guessed the Nazi couldn’t decide what to do next. What was he going to do with his prisoner? The man had to know there were more Russians in the building; the Reds wouldn’t send one woman behind enemy lines like this. His dead mate hanging beside him, nailed to a timber, throat slit and blood dripping, was a fearsome sign. Should he run and save his own skin or take his prisoner down the steps? Or up? If he shouted for help, who might answer his call first?

The German shook the pistol in Chernova’s face. “Wo sind die Russen? Wo sind sie?”

Again, Zaitsev turned over his rifle, readying it to smash the German if he got the chance. A shot would bring attention.

Hidden just behind the wall, he whispered, “Partisan.”

Instantly, a dull thud was followed by a moan of pain. Zaitsev leaped, his rifle over his head, ready to lash out. There, doubled over but still standing, was the German soldier, with Chernova’s foot clenched high between his legs. The guard’s pistol clattered on the landing, then fell to the street below.

Before Zaitsev could surge forward to crush his rifle against the Nazi’s head, Chernova leaped at the man’s throat like a panther, pressing deep into his windpipe. The soldier gurgled and fought back violently. Zaitsev swung the stock of his rifle past Chernova’s shoulder, hard into the Nazi’s nose. The soldier collapsed backward and lay staring up through watering and panicky eyes. Zaitsev raised his rifle again and hammered it down into the soldier’s face. The skull split against the concrete. He rolled the Nazi with his boot to the edge of the wall.

Chernova stood back, her hands clenched. Zaitsev brought his face close. “Come on,” he whispered. “Fast.”

The two sprang up the steps to the third floor. The charges were set in the dynamite. Chekov stood holding the central fuse.

Zaitsev and Chernova hurried to his side. The others moved to the doorway. “You do it,” Zaitsev said. She took his matchbox and lit the fuse. It sparked to life. “Go!” Zaitsev called in a full voice to the men standing by the door. “Go!”

Forgetting all caution, the hares pounded down the stairwell, their boots clomping on the concrete. On the second-floor landing, Zaitsev passed Kostikev standing beside the nailed-up German. Kostikev yanked out his knife; the corpse crumpled.

They raced down the stairs into the cold open air. Behind them, voices shouted from overhead. Machine-gun fire crackled while they leaped over piles of bricks to speed through the rubble. Bullets ricocheted in the dark, though none came close enough to slow the hares down. They pumped their arms and feet and emerged into a narrow street.

“Go! Go!” Zaitsev called to the sprinters on all sides of him. Almost to the moment he’d expected, a roar shattered the night. The ruins suddenly shifted their shadows, flashing red on their wrecked, sad faces, winking at Zaitsev and the hares galloping straight for their own lines down an avenue leading to the rail yard. The rumblings of the explosion and the collapsing building rolled through the dead structures to veil their dash across no-man’s-land and into the safety of the Red Army’s forward trenches.

The five plunged onto the floor of a trench. They breathed hard, clutching their chests. Exhilarated, Zaitsev looked at the bobbing faces of the recruits. Through his heaving rib cage, he found his voice.

“Damn!” he said. “Damn! You think we used enough dynamite?”

Chekov and Kulikov patted each other on the back, laughing and breathless. Kostikev smiled his gilded grin. Tania coughed, struggling for air. She reached out to Kostikev’s shoulder. She pulled her hand back, bloodied.

“Don’t worry,” Kostikev told her, beaming, as the others quieted. “I’m in love with a nurse. I get to see her now.”

A guard in the trench handed down two bottles of vodka. Zaitsev gave the first swallow to Kostikev. The wounded man drank deeply, then reached the bottle back to Zaitsev. The clear glass was smirched with Kostikev’s scarlet handprint.

Zaitsev looked at Kulikov. “Nikolay.”

Kulikov helped Kostikev to his feet. Zaitsev gave them the vodka bottle. Arm in arm, the two men walked away down the darkness of the trench.

Zaitsev stood. He could not see the icehouse but could tell by a licking glow against the sky where the building had stood.

Chekov spoke. “I guess I’ll get some rest, Chief Master Sergeant. Good night, Tania.”

“Good night, Chekov.”

The little soldier yawned. Leaving, he handed Zaitsev the other vodka bottle.

Zaitsev stood next to Chernova. The two of them were alone except for the silent guard at his machine gun. They watched the jumping light of the burning icehouse.

“A good night’s work, don’t you think, partisan?”

She spoke without turning her head. “My name is Tania, if you please, Chief Master Sergeant.”

“All right, then,” he said gently, “Tania.”

He took a swallow, then laid the bottle on the breastwork.

“Good night, Tania,” he said, and walked away up the trench.

TEN

TANIA WOKE IN A TORPOR ON HER BEDROLL. ZAITSEV’S boot nudged her gently in the dark. A steaming cup of tea was waved under her nose. She accepted it, and Zaitsev told her that Kostikev’s wound was only a grazed shoulder. A few stitches, a roll with his nurse, and he’d be good as new.

At dawn, the hares and bears again assembled in the giant Lazur basement. A moist coolness seeped from the concrete floor and block walls. On the far wall a hundred meters away, a row of white circles had been painted one meter above the ground. The circles were in groups of three. The first circle was small and barely visible, perhaps the size of a fist. The ring to the left of it was slightly larger, and the third was twice the size of the first. Above each grouping was a number, one through thirty. A row of barrels and crates lay before the near wall.

Sergeants Zaitsev and Medvedev told the recruits to bring their Moisin-Nagant 91/30 sniper rifles and take a rifle and lie behind the crates and barrels. Each was given a number and told to aim at the largest circle. That circle, Zaitsev said, represented a chest shot at four hundred meters.

After the hares and bears had slid behind cover and leveled their scopes, the two sergeants sat behind them. Tania smelled their cigarettes. She heard laughter from Medvedev. Maybe Zaitsev was telling him about the icehouse mission the night before.

The recruits were left behind the barrels and crates for an hour, eyes straining down their sights. If one turned to speak to the sergeants or even take an eye away from the scope, Medvedev delivered a loud lecture on patience and stamina.

Through her crosshairs, Tania watched the dawn light swell at the far end of the shop. After the first ten minutes, the white circle had begun to rise and fall; her heartbeat had entered her hands. She’d slowed her breathing and eased her grip. Finally, long after her legs and buttocks had begun to tingle from the chilly concrete floor, she heard Zaitsev walk down the line behind her.

“One at a time,” he said quietly, “when I call your number.”

He stood behind the recruits. Several minutes passed.

“Twenty-eight. Fire.”

A shot rang to Tania’s right. She held her breath to bring her target to the center of her crosshairs.

“Fifteen.” Another shot.

“Ten.” Chekov, at Tania’s right elbow, fired. The bang made her jerk left. Immediately, Zaitsev called out, “Nine,” Tania’s number. She corrected a millimeter, squeezed the trigger, and took the jolt, then reacquired the target quickly. A puff drifted on the brick wall dead in the heart of the circle. She smiled on the rifle stock and held still while other numbers were called and more shots barked in the shop.

After the drill, Zaitsev and Medvedev inspected the circles. When they returned, they gave the volunteers permission to fire freely at the targets to practice aim and trigger pressure.

“Stuff something in your ears,” Zaitsev told the recruits, who dug in their pockets for bits of paper and cigarette butts.

The morning wore on, and Tania fired over a hundred rounds. Her shoulder ached as if there were a bullet in it. Each pull of the trigger seemed to carry a different lesson shouted by the two instructors pacing behind the firing line. You’re pulling too hard. You’re drifting to the right. To the left. Get your cheek off the stock. Relax. You’re too loose. Quicker. Take your time.

After an hour, the instructors again inspected the targets. When they returned with serious miens, those trainees who’d erred sufficiently were set back on the line for another session. Tania was not one of them, nor was Fedya.

She rose on legs like India rubber and wobbled from the crates to slouch against a wall. Fedya sat next to her, and she thought how good he looked. He hadn’t shaved in the three days since they’d been flung into the Volga. His new uniform was dirty. His big face was a little less the all-seeing, all-worrying poet, the crazy goose, and showed some of the steel of the sniper volunteer. Something in his eyes was gone; the big stare, the look of wonder, white and broad like an opened book. Now he held his rifle across his lap, excitement on his body.

“Good shots, eh? We’re both good shots,” he said.

Tania touched his knee. “I didn’t know you could handle a rifle that well.”

Fedya sat straighter. “The Bear took me out last night.”

“He what? What did you do?” Tania couldn’t believe it. While she crawled with the hares, Fedya had roamed the darkness with Medvedev. She’d been eager to tell Fedya of her own adventure at the icehouse but now swallowed it. She motioned with her hands as if reeling in yarn, to draw out his story.

Fedya shifted his weight. “Sergeant Medvedev said since I was the only freshman in the group, he could teach me from the beginning and I wouldn’t have anything to unlearn. At midnight we went through the trenches to the Dolgi Ravine. A machine gunner on the ridge was firing at the wounded being evacuated to the river. Sergeant Medvedev let me shoot him.”

Tania leaned forward. “Just like that? You shot him?”

The poet from Moscow had killed his first German and on the morning after possessed so few words for it. Tania was amazed. She thought it would have torn his heart out.

Fedya ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know, Tania. It was… he was shooting at the wounded and the nurses. I got so angry. I didn’t have any problem shooting him. I just…” Fedya looked at his feet.

After a moment, he arranged his rifle in his lap. “Yes,” he said, bringing his eyes up to hers, “I shot him.”

Fedya pulled from his pocket a fresh black notebook. He showed her the first page.

“There it is. October twenty-sixth, 1942. Two-fifteen a.m. Machine gunner. Three hundred meters. Chest shot. Dolgi Ravine. Witness, V. Medvedev.”

Tania flipped through the clean white pages. Each page a life. A German life. A broken stick. I want my own notebook, she thought with envy. I’ll fill up fifty of these.

Fedya tucked the booklet away. “I heard about your raid on the icehouse last night. The sergeant and I heard the blast. It was something.”

Fedya waited for her to speak.

“I made a bet with myself you were in on that,” he added.

She nodded. “It was something.”

He reached his hand out to her. She folded her arms tightly over her chest and looked away at the others in the room, some walking about, some sitting in groups, others still with their attention fixed on their rifles. She shook her head, almost trembling.

“Are you all right?” He lowered his hand.

“Yes.”

She rose, then leaned down and brought her face close.

“Don’t ever touch me in front of the others. Ever.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I can’t do it, Fedya.” She turned away, then stopped and whispered to him angrily. “I must be as good as the others—better, even. And I will not be viewed by them as just a woman. I will not be a nurse or go work a radio in a bunker. That’s where I’ll end up if I’m seen holding your hand. There’s time. There are places. But never until I say so. Do you understand?”

She looked into Fedya’s face, wanting and expecting to find a ripple of pain there. She saw concern. She saw purpose instead of hesitation.

What have I done? she thought. The boy is in love with me.

“Tania, I only wanted to make sure you were all right.” He rose also, shouldering his rifle, and turned to rejoin the bears. “And no, I don’t understand or agree.”

She stopped him. “Fedya?”

“Yes?”

She quietly asked, “Have you told anyone I’m an American?”

“No. And do you know why I haven’t?”

He paced back to her the distance he had walked away. Close to her, his large chest near, she felt heat; the kill had not made him colder but had inflamed him. The poet, the scared boy, was impassioned with a gun in his hands.

Fedya spoke slowly. “Because if I did, they would treat you differently. They’d protect you and parade you like a show pony. I have enough sense to know that, Tania. Give me credit.”

He spun and walked off, his rifle clutched in one mitt.

After thirty minutes, Zaitsev and Medvedev ordered everyone back behind the crates and barrels. The intermediate-sized circles represented a head shot at 300 meters. The smallest circle was also a head shot but at 450 meters, the maximum distance at which they could expect to work. These targets were to be fired upon at will.

“Begin,” Medvedev called, and walked behind the trainees. Zaitsev stood near Tania for five minutes. Through binoculars, he watched the blooms of brick dust issue from her target. With each bullet, words of encouragement and invectives flowed into her ears while Zaitsev, and Medvedev elsewhere along the line, molded the volunteers as quickly as possible into snipers to bedevil the enemy.

TANIA LOWERED HER RIFLE. SHE WAS CERTAIN THAT SHE could not physically tolerate firing one more round. Her elbows, knees, eyes, and especially her right shoulder were pummeled and swollen. Her hips felt locked. She had to roll out of her sitting position onto her stomach and push up to get off the floor.

The trainees limped to the mess line. Each was given a bowl of warm gruel, a plate of sliced meat with bread, and a tin cup of tea. She sat on a crate and looked into the queue where Fedya stood. He nodded. She pointed at the crate next to her.

She wanted to dilute her angry comments of the morning. Perhaps there was a way to make Fedya understand her feelings without cramming them into his ears with such force. They had made love. It had been good, passionate, a release. But what baggage did the act carry? Did it mean they were joined, their spirits entwined the way their bodies had been? Had they been consecrated by Fedya as lovers, turned into pretty images in one of his poems? Or were they nothing more than what Tania felt them to be, two warriors on the edge of a battlefield sharing the last shreds of life left to them? Tania had not visited the depths of love while rocking on the bed with big Fedya. Yes, they had both cried out. But he had called her name.

Tania watched him collect his rations. She saw the agreeable confidence of his motions and thought, There’s no room in me for Fedya’s innocent love. I am full with sorrow and bitterness enough for a hundred hearts. I’ll be his friend. Perhaps I’ll sleep with him again. But I will not fall in love. He’ll accept that. Or he’ll step aside.

Before Fedya could join Tania, Danilov hopped in front of her. The commissar inclined his head in a mannered greeting and sat on the crate next to her. The crate groaned when the rotund little politrook unbuttoned his greatcoat. He took out a pencil and opened his notebook in his lap. A blur of scrawl covered every line and margin as he flipped to one of the few blank pages.

“My dear,” he began, “I am Captain Danilov. I believe you know who I am and my own mission in this sniper unit. Of course, I do not have the honor of actually being a sniper. But I have taken a great interest in the activities of this first class of trainees. I will be describing your activities and lessons for the rest of the army through my articles in In Our Country’s Defense. Perhaps you have read one or two of them?”

“No, comrade commissar.”

“Well,” he replied with a smile, his single eyebrow a cloud over his dark eyes, “maybe you’ll read this next one. You will be in it for your part in last night’s icehouse raid. What can you tell me?”

Tania looked to Zaitsev, who was speaking with some of the hares. She wished he’d save her from this unctuous, dangerous man perched beside her with his legs kicked out in front of him, croaking like a toad. She knew that with a word this commissar could send her out of the sniper school to a noncombatant role. And Fedya was right; if this commissar learned an American was fighting in their number, she would become a curio, a political and propaganda coup, too valuable for the rodina to risk her taking a bullet.

“Have you spoken with Comrade Zaitsev?” she asked. “He was the leader of the mission.”

“We have spoken. It was he who insisted I talk to you. Apparently you killed a Nazi with your bare hands last night. And you lit the fuses that blew up the headquarters.”

Tania looked at the commissar’s little feet. His ebony boots were shiny. She wondered, How does he keep them that way?

Danilov continued. “What do you think of Comrade Zaitsev? And what do you think about being one of his hares?”

Tania searched for something to say. To her surprise, there was more than she expected in her storehouse of words. She realized they were not the words the commissar wanted to hear. He expects me to give him a heroic quote, she thought. How magnificent Zaitsev was in leading our most dangerous mission last night. What an honor it is to serve under such a man. I can’t tell this commissar the truth, that I have no idea whether Zaitsev is a hero or a strutting coward; he seems to me to enjoy his growing status as a headline for In Our Country’s Defense, one of the many new and improved icons of the Russian cause. No, I can’t say true words to this little Chekist, that I also find Zaitsev disturbing, that I want to touch his veined hands and flat Siberian face; when his voice tells me to move or stop, to aim left or jump right, my body follows. How badly I want for him to be the hero that Danilov is constructing.

“Comrade Zaitsev is a bold man,” she said, and the commissar set upon his notebook with his flying pencil. “He is indeed a hero, and all those who fight by his side will do heroic deeds. I am honored to be a sniper, one of the hares, under him.”

“And after the building blew up last night, you ran, simply ran, through the streets to reach the Russian lines?”

“The explosion covered our sounds. I couldn’t hear myself run. Chief Master Sergeant Zaitsev ran ahead of us. We followed. It wasn’t my decision to make. But it was the right decision.”

Danilov closed his notebook. “One last question, Private Chernova. In these dangerous times, it is important that Russia is defended by, let us say, committed fighters. As a woman, you would die for the rodina? You are prepared for that?”

The Communist bastard, she thought. His question carries the same stench as the Green Hats’ queries on the Stalingrad road.

“Comrade commissar, I would not die for the rodina as a woman. I would die as a Russian.” Tania cocked her head as if aiming her sniper rifle. “And I certainly will not die a coward. Comrade.”

Danilov tucked his notebook under his arm and yanked in his legs. He stood from the crate. He was barely taller when standing than Tania was seated.

“Of course, my dear.” He buttoned his coat with one hand. He stopped and reached the hand to Tania. When he spoke, the dramatic and false qualities of his voice were gone.

“Of course. Comrade.”

Tania shook the flabby hand. She watched Danilov walk away. Zaitsev looked across the room. He nodded to Danilov when the little commissar bustled past him.

Tania replaced her spoon into her boot. She laid her plate down and walked back to the firing line. Three other soldiers were taking the time for extra practice. Their shots echoed in the great hall while she knelt behind her crate. She brushed aside empty casings, spilling them to clatter across the floor. She stuffed paper wads in her ears and threw back the bolt to send home another round. Fixing her eye through the scope on the smallest circle, she curled the second fold of her index finger over the trigger. She watched the target bob, riding her heartbeat. She waited, her breathing shallow, for her hand to steady. In seconds the target grew dead still under the crosshairs. It seemed huge, unmissable, summoning the bullet. She pulled the trigger slowly, evenly. The rifle cracked and recoiled into her tender shoulder. Through the scope, she found the sudden red breadth of the brick wall, struck in the center of the smallest circle. She pulled back the bolt to fire again.

THE AFTERNOON SESSION WAS BEGUN WITH ZAITSEV’S call: “Hares! Let’s go! Bring your rifles!”

He led them up the basement steps with his rifle slung across his shoulders like a yoke. The recruits followed him to the Lazur plant’s first floor. They wove through the maze of twisted metal and charred ceiling timbers to a row of sooty windows facing the no-man’s-land rail yard. Zaitsev halted a few steps from one of the large openings; the window sash had long ago been blown in. His boots crunched on broken glass.

He pointed out the window at the German-held buildings beyond no-man’s-land. The air drifting in was brisk, the Russian winter’s first white blossom.

“You are looking west.” Zaitsev spoke. “Right now, the sun is behind you. Whenever possible, set up your shots with the sun at your back. It makes it harder for your enemy to find you. Also, it prevents glare off your scope.”

Tania looked out at the crater-filled rail yard, across which she and Fedya had crawled two nights ago, and the railman’s shed and the trench they’d tumbled into. Now, in the afternoon light, she saw a dozen Russian machine guns, manned at fifty-meter intervals in the trench, aimed across the yard. Fedya and I could have collected a few bullets that night, she thought back. Nicht schiessen.

On all fours, Zaitsev crept to the lip of the window to set his rifle on the sill. He took from his pocket a pair of gloves, which he’d lashed together with string; he laid them on the sill. “Make yourself some sort of shooting bag,” he said over his shoulder. “It’ll keep your barrel from sliding.”

He gazed down his scope. Without moving his head, he said, “See the second German tank, the one with the track blown off?”

Zaitsev fired. In the distance, Tania heard an impact, metal on metal, ping, ring through the report of the rifle.

The Hare turned from his shot. “The iron cross on the front fender of that tank is exactly four hundred meters from this wall. This row of windows is called the ‘shooting gallery.’ You will come here to calibrate your sights regularly or whenever you have any doubts about your rifle’s accuracy. Approach the windows carefully, two at a time. Set your sights for the proper distance and wait for my order to fire.”

Tania crawled to the window in front of her. Beside her was the Armenian woman, Slepkinian. She set her scope for four hundred meters and took careful aim at the Nazi tank’s insignia.

Zaitsev slid back from his window and stood. He raised his binoculars and walked behind the two hares at the first window.

“Shaikin. Fire.”

Tania braced at the report of the rifle to her right. From the field she heard nothing to indicate a hit.

“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.

She adjusted the distance in her scope by adding the required one-eighth for downward shooting. She checked the wind; it was at her back, shielded by the building. The air was cold and would stay that way until April. She was ready now for the order, her first order as a sniper.

The three sat for two hours tracking the Nazis through their scopes. At intervals they took turns stretching, away from the windows. Tania’s legs and hands ached with the tense inaction. Her vision frosted from keeping one eye closed and the other squinting. Her cheek and fingers grew stiff against the gun’s metal.

The sun climbed, and Tania’s patience chafed. How long do we have to wait? Sokolov must be in position by now. From where we sit, Shaikin, Slepkinian, and I can take out three Nazi machine gun positions in ten seconds. Wasn’t that the idea, to help secure this corridor between the plants? Why are we waiting?

Shaikin rolled back from the window onto his back. The little man leaped with amazing agility to his feet. Tania looked away from her scope. Her ears picked up what he must have heard. Footsteps coming up the stairwell!

She reached into her coat for a grenade and rolled onto her belly. Slepkinian did the same. Shaikin laid his back against the wall beside the doorway. He held his open palm to them for silence. A knife appeared in one hand, a pistol in the other.

The footfalls were careless and loud, scuffing on the gritty steps. The sounds stopped in the hall just beyond the door.

Shaikin looked to Tania. She nodded back.

Shaikin flashed into the hallway, his pistol up.

Without a word or a glance back, he straightened and lowered the pistol to his side. He took two steps backward. Tania tightened her grip on the grenade. She glanced quickly over at the Cow. No surrender, she thought, clenching her teeth. I don’t care what Shaikin is doing.

Shaikin backed into the room. Tania pulled the pin on her grenade and brought her arm back to let it fly. From the hall, she heard a whisper.

“Tania? Tania, are you in here?”

Fedya walked into the room, his hands still up, palms facing outward where he’d flung them when surprised by Shaikin’s pistol. Behind him was the giant Griasev.

Shaikin smiled at Tania and Slepkinian.

“We should have known by the noise they were making,” he said quietly. “Bears.”

Tania slipped the pin back into the grenade. “What are you doing here?” she whispered to Fedya. She slid on her stomach back to the window.

“Medvedev sent us. He came up to the floor below you this morning and saw how good your vantage point was. We were in a building three blocks down where nothing was going on.”

Griasev wagged his head. “Not a damn thing.”

“So have you got plenty of Germans for us?” Fedya grinned.

“Take those windows there,” Tania answered, pointing.

“And be quiet,” added Slepkinian.

Tania was impressed with the Cow. She’d looked ready to fight it out, ready to die moments before.

Fedya and Griasev crawled to their places. Fedya set himself into shooting position, knees up. He wrapped the rifle strap around his wrist and elbow. He set a bundled pair of gloves on the sill and laid his barrel on them, careful to keep the muzzle back out of sight from below. He gazed through his scope to take in the German activity across the street. Tania watched him adjust his scope for distance. One-eighth, she thought, certain that he knew.

“What do you think, Tania?” Fedya asked. “Three twenty-five?”

The giant Griasev answered for her. “Three fifty.”

“Three twenty-five,” said Tania.

Fedya looked away from his sight for a moment. He caught Tania looking.

“Yes,” he whispered, “lots of Germans.”

Tania frowned. Fedya shrugged and tilted his head to look innocent, blameless for his sudden appearance here. He returned his attention to the Nazis.

Another hour passed in nippy stillness among the five snipers. Tania continued to curse Zaitsev under her breath for holding up the order to shoot. She followed the two dozen Nazis through her scope, noting how they grew more careless as their movements increased. They were digging new trenches, adding height to old ones and filling sandbags. Some even walked in the open, lugging ammunition boxes four hundred meters away.

They think they’re unseen and clever, Tania thought. They think they’re the ones with a surprise for us. But from this height, the five of us could easily wipe those sticks out. With a signal; that’s all it would take. Where is it?

At that moment, a column of German infantry burst from an alley into the street, only two hundred meters away. Tania raised her head from her scope. There looked to be about twenty in the line jogging in formation directly below.

Tania’s ears were clawed by the pounding of the Nazis’ boots on the pavement. Her hands tightened on the rifle. The bitter taste of bile rose in her throat. She recalled the sight of her grandparents’ bodies in the city square. The leaning shadow of Lenin. The footfalls of Nazis stepping in unison on the bricks. Arms restraining her, shrieks, her own voice and blood. But right now she was the one with a rifle in her hands, she was the one with them in her sights. She clenched her jaw, fleering back her lips, baring her teeth. The moments ticked; Tania felt as if she were swelling to a point where she could not contain herself and would burst.

She brought her eye down to the scope and took aim at the soldier running at the head of the squad. The black crosshairs bobbed from her pounding pulse, but the Nazis were so close below that it made little difference. She followed the one soldier running past in the street below, now less than one hundred meters away.

“Fire!” she screamed, surprised at the abruptness of her voice. Past thinking, as if she had kicked open a gate and now must go through it, she squeezed her trigger. She held tight through the jolt of the shot. The gray-green uniform jogging at the front of the line of soldiers crumpled in her scope.

The Nazis froze. Their heads jerked up at the report roaring above them.

Tania flung back the bolt. The Cow fired. A soldier in the rear of the line clutched his chest and fell.

In an instant, the room was engulfed in the sound of all five sniper rifles opening up. Those soldiers in the front and back of the line were dropped first, then the ones in the middle. The dark bodies piled up beneath the hail of bullets. Tania concentrated on the front of the line, knocking down men stumbling over corpses.

In less than fifteen seconds, it ended. Blue rifle smoke clouded the ceiling and slipped out the windows into the shattered morning. Shell casings littered the floor. Tania and her team sat hunched over their rifles. She surveyed the street through her scope, her heart pounding in her ears. She counted the victims in carnage below, stabbing each magnified body with her reticle. Most of the dead lay in a line, killed where they’d stood in the first few moments. Behind some of the bodies, smears of blood stained the street, marking the short trail of their last effort in life, crawling toward cover.

Tania’s abdomen jittered. The scope danced in her hands. She called out, “Seventeen?”

Shaikin answered, breathless. “Seventeen.”

Tania looked behind the buildings to the Nazi trenches they’d watched since dawn. These Germans had stopped their work to burrow behind their revetments and spin their machine guns back and forth to find the source of the gunfire. We’re too far away, thought Tania, pulling back from the window. They didn’t see us. Good. We’ll attend to them later, and with a bonus of seventeen broken sticks. We got them all.

Tania turned. The other snipers had lowered their rifles. Shaikin and Griasev shook hands. Slepkinian looked left and right, beaming. Only Fedya seemed displeased. He slid bullets into his magazine and shook his head.

Griasev jiggled a meaty, happy fist at Tania.

“That was some ambush,” he said, and exhaled. He clapped his great hands, rubbing them together as if eager to begin a meal.

Tania laid down her rifle and crawled from the window. Shaikin did the same. Slepkinian, Griasev, and Fedya continued to watch the German positions. The Armenian girl whistled at the mounds of dead in the street.

Well away from the windows, Shaikin walked up to Tania. “What do you think?” he asked.

“I think we put them in our books. Three each. And give the extra two to Fedya and the Cow.”

“Then we wait for orders, I guess.”

Tania walked to the doorway to sit on the stairs and collect the thoughts ricocheting in her head. She needed to grab them and cool the frenzy inside her. We’ve been taught to act with initiative, she told herself. To seize opportunities for targets, to make things happen. To wait, wait as long as we have to, then act. That’s what we did here. We waited long enough. All morning. The sticks are the enemy. That’s seventeen of them dead. That’s revenge. What more can Zaitsev want?

Tania looked at her three comrades scanning through their scopes. The light was high in the northeast now, casting shadows behind them on the filthy floor.

Shadows. The light was in their faces.

Tania’s ears pricked up. She heard a low hiss slither in through the windows. With her legs locked, her mind racing, the sound swelled into a whooshing whistle.

No, she thought. No!

The wall in front of her blew apart. Before her senses could leap, a ball of flame and a powerful black gust smashed her backwards. Bricks spewed on all sides, riding the shock wave of the explosion. Tania was hurled against the wall and collapsed to the floor. A sickening nausea spun inside her. She was deafened, numbed by the blow.

When she opened her eyes, the room was shrouded in thick whorls of smoke. Through the heart of the haze Tania saw the huge hole in the wall. The light streaming in gave the room a swirling glow.

Beside her lay Shaikin, his chin badly gashed and bleeding. He staggered to his feet and braced his hands against the wall as if climbing it. Blood was quickly covering the front of his coat.

“Up!” he screamed at Tania. “Up! Get out!”

Shaikin pulled her to her feet with a grunt. She stood and her knees buckled. Shaikin pushed her against the wall and held her there for a moment until her legs stiffened enough to support her.

Shaikin, his front stained in a crimson bib, gripped Tania’s shoulders to push her to the doorway.

“No,” she murmured, turning back to the room. “Wait.”

Shaikin yelled in her ear, “They’re dead! Dead, Tania! Go!”

He spun her around by the sleeves. She heard his shouts through the havoc. She saw the doorway and lurched toward it, dragging her feet through the rubble.

ZAITSEV PUSHED BACK THE BLANKET AND STEPPED gently into the hares’ quarters.

She sat in a corner, where she had been alone for three hours. Shaikin, stumbling from blood loss, had been left with a nurse who’d spotted them retreating along the Volga.

Zaitsev crouched beside her. He leaned onto the toes of his boots, pulling his heels off the floor.

“What happened?” His voice was kinder than his face.

Tania fought back tears. She had not yet cried and did not want to do so in front of Zaitsev.

In an even voice, looking at his boots, she told him of the morning. She described the activity in the trenches behind the buildings, how easy the Germans would have been to pick off, how she and the others had watched patiently for hours. Then the patrol had surprised them, running in from nowhere. She’d reacted quickly, perhaps too quickly.

Zaitsev raised his head at this. Tania looked into his flat face. His eyes throbbed.

“What do you mean, you reacted too quickly?”

Tania felt a twinge of alarm flash across her shoulders.

“I—” She stopped.

Zaitsev’s gaze narrowed. His jaw worked behind drawn lips.

“I fired first. I gave the order,” she admitted.

Zaitsev’s hand lashed across Tania’s face, knocking her onto her side.

He stood from his crouch. “Get up!”

Tania rose. Her face stung, but she did not rub it. She backed against the wall and hung her arms at her sides.

“Comrade,” she began.

“Be quiet.”

Zaitsev stepped closer, his face only a few centimeters away. She felt heat move into the cheek he’d struck.

He shouted in her face. “What are you going to say to me, partisan? Tell me! Tell me you’re sorry you disobeyed a direct order. All right, Comrade Chernova. You’re forgiven. Tell me you’re sorry you jeopardized a vital mission. Again, Comrade Chernova, you’re forgiven. The mission continued anyway.”

He caged his voice behind clenched teeth.

“Now tell me how sorry you are that your actions killed Slepkinian, Griasev, and Michailov. You alone are responsible for their deaths. No one else.”

Tania swallowed hard. She felt immersed in dizzying, rocking waves of dread, as though she’d again been flung into the Volga.

“You didn’t get them all, Private. One of them crawled away to a mortar crew with the coordinates to your position.”

He balled his fist, “Your fucking position! You disobeyed my orders, you gave away your position and traded the lives of three of my snipers for seventeen infantrymen! Each of those snipers was worth a hundred Nazis. And you traded them for seventeen!”

Zaitsev pulled his face back, breathing hard through his nose. His wide-set eyes gouged into hers. She felt his pupils bearing down like the dark barrels of twin sniper rifles. Tania’s mind was blank, producing no thoughts of her own. Everything she heard or felt, all her senses, were in Zaitsev’s furious hands. Only a pulse of remorse cut to her surface to mingle with the mean flush in her cheek. All else waited.

Zaitsev shook his head. “We are not here to erase your memories, partisan. I don’t know what you’ve seen or what you’ve lost, but whatever it is, your pain is not greater than Russia’s.”

He pulled himself erect. “Russia’s, damn it! Not your pain, But Russia’s! You are in the Red Army! You are no longer fighting a one-woman war! Don’t ever forget this! Don’t ever! It was your stupidity and selfishness that murdered three Russian soldiers!”

He leveled a shaking, angry finger at her. “From this moment on, you will do what you are told to the letter or I’ll have Danilov put a bullet in the back of your brain! Do you understand me?”

Zaitsev spun on his heels and stomped from the room. He yanked the blanket from its nails when he flung it aside.

Tania slid down the wall. Tears welled in her eyes. She felt them slipping over her cheeks. The tears tapped on the backs of her hands, limp in her lap.

Tania closed her eyes. She tried to listen to her own sobbing, but her ears were full of Zaitsev’s anger. He’d screamed at her. He’d struck her.

She felt exiled from her body, floating beside it as if her spirit had become so full of grief and guilt she had to leave its bounds to contain it all. She looked down on herself, slumped there against the wall. She tried to feel pity for the weeping girl. All she felt was contempt.

I killed them, she realized. I, stupid and selfish, killed them. I am responsible. I am sitting here, crying, trembling, alive. And they are not.

She thudded her head against the wall. She searched for her voice to speak to the echoes of Zaitsev’s boots disappearing down the hall, to answer the image in her mind of Fedya lying broken beneath a smoking pile of rubble, his young poet’s eyes open, his stare no longer at this world.

She held her hands in front of her, making fists and releasing them, flexing the fingers until they hurt, as if she were clawing her way out of a dungeon. Pain delivered her back inside her body.

Her cheek glowed. She whispered, “I understand.”