* * * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

TWO

 

THE DUEL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * * *

 

ELEVEN

 

 

THE PANZER GROWLED AROUND THE CORNER, ITS IRON hatches shut tight. Cautiously, the tank ground down the street, swinging its gray turret with a metallic whine. The crew inside looked for the Russians they knew were dug into the ruins ahead.

 

From behind, another panzer watched the progress of the lead tank, guarding it with a motionless cannon. Farther around the corner, out of view, an infantry unit waited to move in behind the tank cover.

 

A small explosion leaped from the second floor of a building at the far end of the street. A Russian 76 mm antitank gun had opened up at fifty meters and missed. The lead tank slammed into reverse and accelerated backward down the street, elevating its turret to the telltale flash of the antitank gunner’s discharge. Farther back, the idling guard tank fired an antipersonnel shell into the ruins. A squad of Nazi infantrymen jumped from their hiding places to rake the now revealed Russian position with bullets and grenades.

 

At this moment in the battle, the way he’d learned over the past ten days on a dozen other streets like this, Corporal Nikki Mond raised his binoculars to the rooftops and teetering facades above the clatter. There, as if preordained, he spotted the bristles of Russian sniper rifles. They appeared only for a moment, like black thorns protruding from the buildings. With the sounds of distant, single pops, they picked off the German infantry one by one.

 

Nikki knew these sharpshooters had lain motionless for hours, since before dawn, in the eaves of those skeletal buildings. During this first week of November, what the soldiers had taken to calling “the quiet days,” Nikki had grown aware of the increasingly deadly presence of enemy snipers. With the faltering of the Luftwaffe and the prevalence of smaller-scale battles, these silent assassins of the Red Army seemed to have crept into every crevice along the front line.

 

Nikki had witnessed several occasions where the action escalated from this point, each side calling in more and heavier weapons. If for some reason they did not, then the furor always settled down, with the dead left lying in full view. The wounded had to drag themselves to cover, then stay where they were until dark, unable even in their agony to cry out for help for fear that the snipers above or a creeping Ivan would finish them off. During the “quiet days,” few prisoners were being taken.

 

This tedious taking and giving of alleys, streets, and buildings had become for the combatants of both armies the real battle of Stalingrad. Instead of the major confrontations of September and October spent pounding against the thin Russian beachhead, all the actions mounted now were disjointed local clashes at the company level, with each side trying to improve its position meter by meter. The bitter siege had become a grim bog, allowing only slow, torturous steps.

 

Both armies had gone underground. Cellars, culverts, tunnels, and a seemingly endless network of shallow trenches called “rat runs,” like scratches over the city’s frozen skin, now made up the contours of the battlefield under the gathering winter sky. The foot soldiers of the Wehrmacht called it Rattenkrieg. War of the rats.

 

Nikki lowered his binoculars to scribble hurried memos in his notebook. This was his new assignment: forward observer, assigned to German intelligence. His charge was to watch frontline infantry action and report on tactics and casualty counts.

 

After Captain Mercker and his unit were buried in the debris, Nikki had led his nine fellow survivors to a Command forward headquarters. There he’d encountered an intense young lieutenant, Karl Ostarhild. He told Ostarhild of the disaster while the officer poured him a cup of coffee. Ostarhild rolled out a map for him to locate the blown-up building where Mercker and his company had died. Hovering over the map, Nikki pointed out what he knew about the Red positions, strong points and weaknesses. Ostarhild had been impressed not only by the breadth of Nikki’s observations and knowledge but by how hard he’d won them. The lieutenant asked Nikki to stay on under his command as an intelligence observer. Nikki accepted gladly.

 

Since then, he’d followed the sounds of rattling tanks and chattering automatic weapons across the city. He had not himself fired a weapon or thrown a grenade in twelve days. He did not even carry his rifle any longer.

 

Ostarhild was growing nervous about the information he was getting. He’d spent weeks compiling data from reconnaissance planes, visual observations, prisoner interrogations, and radio intercepts. He had no doubt that something very big was in the works on the Russian side. He didn’t know what, but the signs told him it was of titanic scale.

 

The day before, on November seventh, Ostarhild had taken his data plus his preliminary conclusions to brief his superiors in Golubinka, several kilometers west on the safety of the steppe. He laid out his reports of a massive buildup of men and materiel in the northern, Kletskaya region. The lieutenant presented his theory that this might be a Russian attack army, armed and mobile, primed for a counter-offensive. He gave the assembled generals details about each Red unit, where they came from, even the names of their commanders.

 

Ostarhild related that the Russian Sixty-second Army, under General Chuikov, had been forced by STAVKA, the Russian high command, to suffer through a severe reduction in ammunition. Where was the ammo going? That morning, which happened to be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin had made a surprisingly jubilant speech, monitored by shortwave from Moscow. Referring to the battle for Stalingrad, Stalin offered the cryptic reference that “soon there’s going to be a holiday in our street, too.”

 

Drawing partially on Nikki’s observations and frontline savvy, Ostarhild presented a vivid picture of the current status of the battle. The attack on Stalingrad had become a series of violent, personal battles. The Germans, in small groups, might occasionally grab a block of ruins or even reach the Volga in or around the factory district. Once they’d consolidated their gains by digging in, the units often found themselves cut off by Russians who moved back across the narrow corridors the Germans had cut. The wounded were frequently unreachable; the dead were left to stiffen in gruesome postures on the ground. The men were losing all hope of personal survival. They continued to fight, but too often their strength was the result of alcohol or contraband amphetamines. Ostarhild depicted the Nazi soldier as unshaven, weary from lack of sleep or relief, ridden with lice, fearful of spending another Russian winter in battle, and having lost all sense of the Reich’s greater purpose in bleeding for this city. Now, they fought—Ostarhild quoted the words of a battlefield reporter—”only for the ultimate obsession: to get at one another’s throats.”

 

The Russian position in the city was equally perilous. Along a three-mile stretch, the Reds clung desperately to their diminishing portion. In some places the riverbank was less than a hundred meters from their backs. Along with a throttled reserve of ammunition and a fantastic casualty rate, the Russians’ looming problem was that the Volga—the Red Army’s only link to its supply lines—was quickly growing unnavigable. The huge ice floes from the north that annually clogged the river had begun to tighten, but the Volga would not freeze solid enough to permit ground transport over it for another four or five weeks. Until then, the Reds’ reinforcements and supplies would be drastically reduced, if not cut off altogether.

 

The young lieutenant was asked by his commanding officers if this, then, was not a good time to mount one more large offensive. Ostarhild had anticipated the question: he knew the instant he heard it that he couldn’t answer honestly. A true response would not have been what the staff wanted to hear nor what they were prepared to pass on to General Paulus, the head of the Sixth Army. In his heart, Ostarhild felt the common soldiers had grown too disorganized, too cold in the shadow of their own doom to take part effectively in any more major assaults. As an intelligence officer, he’d censored hundreds of letters from the troops addressed to loved ones back home. Without exception, the letters displayed a deep brooding over their bleak prospects for returning to Germany alive. Command had responded by ordering all such letters intercepted and impounded. No sense depressing the home front with defeatist claptrap, they’d said.

 

Instead of laying before the officers the naked truth, Ostarhild spoke carefully, choosing terms he knew would be politic for their ears. The German soldier will fight bravely, he said, regardless of the assignment. But the generals had to act quickly before the window of opportunity closed. Ostarhild kept to himself his dread that the window had slammed shut weeks ago. Another offensive might be successful, he said, especially while the Russians’ supply lines were threatened by the river. But Germany faced several new obstacles here in early November. The weather, the men’s physical condition, and low morale certainly had to be addressed, but equally dangerous to the Reich’s presence in Stalingrad was the growing number of enemy snipers.

 

The Red sharpshooters had adapted to the destroyed urban terrain far better than the Germans had, Ostarhild observed. They were rapidly becoming very effective. The enemy snipers were responsible for untold casualties, including many among the officer corps. A conservative estimate ranged between one and two hundred wounded or dead per day.

 

The casualties came in such a terrible way, too—from a distance, from an unseen rifleman who crawled off and escaped detection. The snipers delivered death always as an awful, bloody shock. The men in the trenches had come to believe there was no haven from them. Any movement, even while smoking or relieving themselves, could draw a sniper’s attention. The thought of being hunted through a telescopic sight, of being marked unknowingly with invisible black crosshairs and then selected for a bullet in the brain and instant death, was a chilling, ugly prospect. The men were demoralized. Worse, they were becoming paralyzed.

 

Ostarhild showed the generals a file folder of clippings from the Russian military newspaper Red Army and the locally printed trench news sheet In Our Country’s Defense. Attached were translations prepared by his staff. He brought their attention to the articles under the heading “From the Front” by a Russian commissar, I. S. Danilov. These were stories of a newly formed Russian sniper school in the 284th Division under Colonel Batyuk. “Obviously,” he concluded, “the Russian command has seen the value of just such a sniper movement. But I doubt even they could have foreseen just how troublesome their snipers would become.”

 

General Schmidt, Paulus’s aide-de-camp and the ranking officer in the meeting, nodded while he scanned the translations.

 

“These articles,” he said, “make a very big show over this sniper Zaitsev, the one they call the Hare. He appears to be the brains behind this sniper school.”

 

Ostarhild agreed. “Yes, sir. He’s Siberian, a hunter from the Urals. Their press is building him up as their prototypical sniper, a great hero.”

 

Schmidt tapped the papers with the back of his hand.

 

“Then I think it would be very good for the morale of our men to catch this hero Zaitsev and blow his goddammed head off.”

 

Schmidt read a few moments longer. The general looked up and beamed around the room with a fat smile.

 

“And from the looks of things, this fellow Danilov has been quite a help to us.” He held up the sheaves of In Our Country’s Defense, shaking them at Ostarhild. “What we have here, gentlemen, is a catalog of all of Herr Zaitsev’s tactics. It seems to be quite lengthy and complete, wouldn’t you say, Lieutenant? How he thinks, what ruses he prefers, and so on. Tell me: in your opinion, will these help us catch this Russian son of a bitch? This little Red rabbit?”

 

The other generals in the room sniggered. Ostarhild nodded and said, “Yes, sir, they should.”

 

“Then wire back to Berlin on my orders,” Schmidt said, standing to conclude the interview. “Tell them we want to kill the best sniper in the whole Russian army. Send me the best German sniper. The very best. Immediately.”

 

* * * *

 

TWO DAYS AFTER OSTARHILD’S MEETING WITH THE General staff, on the afternoon of November ninth, Nikki stood in a swirling snowfall at Gumrak airfield, fifteen kilometers west of the city center. Gumrak’s single landing strip and lone blockhouse formed the closest air link between Germany and Stalingrad. In the last months, the name Gumrak had taken on both joyful and dire connotations among the soldiers of the Wehrmacht embattled in Stalingrad. Gumrak meant you were going home, perhaps bouncing in a seat, safely watching Russia grow small and fade into the mist; perhaps, and all too likely, in the darkness of a canvas bag. They’ve surely run out of pine boxes by now.

 

Nikki squinted through the whipping whiteness of the snow. He watched the Heinkel He-111 bomber roll to a stop on the runway forty meters from his staff car. This was the first snow of the winter. It came a full month before the early dustings Nikki remembered from home in Westphalia.

 

The roar of the bomber’s engines peaked and cut back. The blades flipped to a halt. The plane brooded in its own silence for several minutes. No one came to meet it or stepped out of it. Nikki bounced on his toes to stay warm, his hands buried deep in his pockets, the flakes catching on his eyelashes.

 

The door in the plane’s midsection opened. A duffel bag was tossed out. A man jumped down behind it and landed heavily. He picked up the bag and walked through the slashing snowfall.

 

The plane’s motors spit and the propellers whirled to life. The figure approached. He wore a long, black woolen coat without insignia. His hat was ebony felt, broad-brimmed and stiff, new. A brown muffler crossed his face below his nose. The hat’s brim guarded his eyes.

 

To the rising sound of the engines, the man handed his bag to Nikki, then strode past him to the waiting staff car.

 

Through the bulk of the stranger’s coat, Nikki gauged him to be rather round, no taller than himself. This is the supersniper from Berlin, he thought. I expected to meet a titan, a rock-jawed veteran with eyes of blue granite. Oh, well, that was my own romance. This seems to be a soft man hurrying past me to get into the car and out of the cold. He must be very, very good.

 

Nikki started the car and steered off the runway. He did not slide the heater knob out, deciding to let the engine warm up before bringing in the air.

 

“Where’s the heat?” the man asked through his scarf. “You could have let the car idle while you waited. It could have been warm when I got in.”

 

“Yes, sir. I apologize.” Nikki looked in the mirror. “Your plane was delayed, sir. I didn’t want to waste fuel.”

 

Nikki pulled out the knob to let cool air flow into the cab. The two rode in silence along the dirt road leading to Ostarhild’s headquarters. Nikki stole glances in the mirror at the stranger. Only after the cabin had warmed did the man uncoil the scarf and push up the brim of his hat.

 

He smiled, catching Nikki’s eyes on him in the mirror. “What’s your name, Corporal?”

 

“Nikolas Mond, sir. From Westphalia.”

 

“Ah, yes.” The man nodded and looked out the fogged window at the gripping snow. “I’ve hunted there many times. Geese mainly, but wonderful ducks, too.”

 

The man seemed to want conversation. The blue-gray eyes in the mirror waited for a reply.

 

“My family has a farm there,” Nikki said. “Every harvest, we throw corn on the open fields. The ducks practically fly into the house and land on the supper table.”

 

“Yes.” The man laughed. “I love the taste of stupid ducks better than the smart ones.”

 

He took off his hat and gloves and laid them across his lap. His hair was cut short, light brown like the winter-dead steppe whisking by the car windows. His skin, cream pale, was stretched taut over pads of fat about the neck and ears that softened the angles of his face. Nikki noted the smallness of his ears, nose, and mouth, and how his eyes dominated his face as if they were two blue ponds and the rest simply gathered there to drink. When he blinked, it was slow and deliberate, but his head moved quickly, in staccato bursts. It made Nikki remember barn owls on the farm.

 

Nikki guided the staff car onto the paved road. A swastika fluttered on the front left fender to mark the passenger as important. Nikki drove slowly, guiding the car through droves of soldiers on foot. The men appeared to be ambling aimlessly, huddled against the snow. Some were wrapped in blankets. Many had stuffed newspaper under their helmets and inside their coats, evoking the image of scarecrows.

 

A horse-drawn cart stopped in front of Nikki. He brought the staff car to a halt. The soldiers on either side would not give way. Nikki did not want to blow the horn at the shuffling men, but he had to get through.

 

“It’s all right, Corporal,” the man in the backseat said. “Wait a moment.”

 

Nikki looked at the load in the rear of the cart. Piled high against the rails were bodies, stiffened, clutching at nothing. Their heads were bent at violent angles. Bare feet protruded from the tangled mass of gray-green uniforms; boots and socks had been reclaimed by the cold hands of the living. A delicate shroud of snow nestled and built in the crevices of their crooked elbows and bent legs, unmelting white filling in eye sockets and open mouths.

 

An officer spotted the staff car waiting behind the cart. He ordered the men walking along the shoulder to make way. The officer waved Nikki around the cart. Nikki saluted the officer and turned onto the shoulder. The officer did not take notice.

 

In the mirror, the man’s great eyes were closed, his eyelids like drawn curtains. He said, “You know who I am?”

 

“Yes, sir,” Nikki replied. “You’re SS Colonel Heinz Thorvald from Berlin.”

 

The colonel opened his eyes. “From Gnössen, actually. I’ve been there for the past year teaching. Berlin is close, though. I go in for the theater every so often. Do you like the opera, Corporal? They have it in Westphalia, I know. I’ve been there.”

 

“No, sir. There’s never time on the farm.”

 

The eyes closed again. “No, I don’t suppose there is. The British bombed the State Opera House in Berlin. The Führer had it rebuilt. They’re opening it at the end of this month. Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. I want to be home for that.”

 

Nikki concentrated on the road. Now that it had cleared, he stepped on the gas, speeding his passenger, the most dangerous longdistance killer in the entire German army, the supersniper Heinz Thorvald, to Lieutenant Ostarhild’s offices.

 

* * * *

 

OSTARHILD WALKED INTO THE SNOW TO GREET THORVALD. He came to attention and saluted. Nikki opened the rear door of the car. The colonel returned the salute and followed the young officer into the office. Nikki came with the colonel’s bag.

 

Ostarhild poured the colonel a cup of coffee and offered a seat beside a coal brazier. Nikki hadn’t seen the stove or the coal before. The lieutenant had scrounged them up for Thorvald’s visit.

 

The two officers exchanged pleasantries about Berlin and Stuttgart, Ostarhild’s home. The pheasant hunting around Stuttgart, it seemed, was wonderful.

 

The lieutenant warmed Thorvald’s coffee. He used the break in the conversation to shift to the colonel’s assignment.

 

Ostarhild took from the top of his desk a collection of articles with translations attached by paper clips. The articles were from In Our Country’s Defense. That morning, Ostarhild had let Nikki read them. The lieutenant handed them now to the Berlin master sniper.

 

“Colonel, these were written by a Red Army commissar. They directly concern your target, Chief Master Sergeant Vasily Zaitsev. It seems a simple hunter from Siberia has become quite a hero for the Russians.”

 

Thorvald looked into his coffee.

 

“And quite a problem for you, yes?”

 

Ostarhild folded his hands. “More so than even these clippings tell. Zaitsev, nicknamed ‘the Hare,’ has become the head of a sort of impromptu Russian sniper school. In the past two weeks, more and more names have appeared in these articles, all students of his. You’ll see them marked in the translations. Medvedev. Chekov. Shaikin. Chernova. The commissar believes some of the pupils rival their teacher in audacity, but none has surpassed him in skill. The Hare has taught three dozen snipers to work directly along the front lines. With their average range of three hundred to four hundred meters, they’re doing no small amount of damage deep behind our lines. We’re losing men to these snipers, yes, but worse, we’re losing morale at a fearsome rate.”

 

Thorvald looked up. “Three to four hundred meters. That’s not so good for an expert sniper.”

 

Ostarhild shook his head. “According to these articles, Zaitsev’s is five hundred to five fifty.”

 

“Mine,” Thorvald said quietly, “is better.”

 

Ostarhild waited for the colonel to finish his coffee and slide the cup to the corner of the desk.

 

“Colonel Thorvald, I have orders to assist you in any way I can. I’ve made provisions to quarter you here at my office. There is a room here that you may make your own until you complete your assignment. I’ve also arranged for one of our snipers to be your guide. Beyond this, what else can I do for you?”

 

Thorvald turned slowly, then moved his head in a quick jerk at Nikki. Nikki stood straighter under the gaze of the colonel.

 

“This man,” Thorvald said to the lieutenant without taking his eyes from Nikki, “is he brave?”

 

Ostarhild shrugged, as if to admit he did not know what to make of the question.

 

“Yes, Colonel. He is. Very brave. And not foolish.”

 

“Has he fought? Does he know the battlefield?”

 

Ostarhild raised his hand to Nikki. “Corporal, tell the colonel something of your experiences.”

 

“You tell me, Lieutenant,” Thorvald said, his voice even, dissecting. His look remained fixed on Nikki. “I don’t want to hear what he thinks of his own courage. I want to hear what you think. If he is a brave man, a brave man will not say so.”

 

Ostarhild spoke to the back of the colonel’s head. “Corporal Mond has fought through the worst of Stalingrad. And I can tell you, Colonel Thorvald, the worst of Stalingrad is the worst of hell.”

 

Thorvald’s stare at Nikki broke, a smile riving his face like a sudden crack in white ice.

 

“Good.” The colonel faced Ostarhild. “I would like him to be my guide and spotter.”

 

The lieutenant sat forward. “Colonel, as I said, I’ve arranged for one of our snipers to be your spotter. He knows the battlefield as well as this corporal and he has experience with the Russian snipers.”

 

“I don’t want anyone with experience against Russian snipers. I don’t want advice and tidbits. This Zaitsev has made a science of studying German snipers. I don’t want someone who’ll get me killed. I want someone who’ll do what I say. This corporal of yours knows the battlefield. He’s obviously a survivor. You say he’s a fighter. And I know he understands fear. I can see it in his eyes. He knows what it can do.”

 

Ostarhild shook his head. “Colonel, with all due respect, one of our snipers would be—”

 

Thorvald interrupted him. “Snipers are cowards. All of us are. We kill without fighting. Remember, Lieutenant, I taught your German snipers everything they know.”

 

The colonel rose. “Corporal, have you killed men?”

 

Nikki nodded.

 

Thorvald spoke to Ostarhild. “I have never killed a man. I’ve shot hundreds but I’ve never killed a man. I merely take away their lives. They fall down when I pull a trigger half a kilometer away. That’s all.” The colonel pointed at Nikki. “I can’t do what he can. I can’t fight. I only shoot. That makes me a coward. I know it. This man is no coward. He comes with me.”

 

Ostarhild stood also. “Yes, sir. Of course. Corporal, you will join the colonel at dawn. Go back to your quarters and get some rest. I’ll meet you here in the morning. Dismissed.”

 

Nikki saluted the two officers. He walked out the door into the dimming evening light. The snow had eased. He guessed it would stop within the hour.

 

Ostarhild’s offices were on the first floor of the remains of a department store, across the street from a park. North of the park was the central rail station and a tourist hotel. East of the store was a set of concrete steps that once had led through statues and fountains down to a river walk, then along the river to the main ferry landing. From the landing, pleasure boats had carried bathers out to the sandy beaches of the islands in the Volga. Shops, bakeries, kiosks, the local newspaper, a folklore museum, boat rentals, a political auditorium, an open-air market, a church—the shattered remains of all these lay around him like giant scattered skeletons while he walked to his quarters.

 

This city, he thought, has been stripped and smothered by a war so vast and powerful it can mow down a row of buildings like a scythe. Now this stomping, charging, consuming war is slowing down, shifting its focus to become personal. Now it’s one man, flown in all the way from Berlin, assigned to kill one man.

 

Will this war overlook nothing, Nikki wondered? Is it beginning to hunt for us now by name, one at a time?

 

* * * *

 

NIKKI LAY ON HIS BEDROLL. HE’D MADE HIS QUARTERS in the basement of a bakery. Bread ovens and cooling racks stood against the walls. The strong flooring overhead had held through the bombings. Nikki knew he was lucky to have such a secure and private place to lay his head.

 

He spent several hours in front of a lantern with maps of the factory district and workers’ settlements spread on the floor. He rummaged through his knowledge of the front, searching for clues to where the Hare might be operating. It’s unlikely, he thought, that Zaitsev will stalk the northernmost of the plants, the Tractor Factory. We swept it of almost all resistance at the end of October. We own it, and it’ll never be worth what we paid for it. The middle factory, the Barricades, is finally tilting our way after weeks of fighting. But every step there in that monstrous web of steel and concrete is incredibly dangerous. Besides, there’s nothing but privates and corporals throwing their lives down like dice in the Barricades. Zaitsev likes bigger fish, the kind that make it into the Russian press: officers, artillery spotters, machine gunners. He likes drama. My guess is he’s working the Red October or the corridor between the Red October and the Lazur. Or the eastern slope of Mamayev Kurgan. The Russians are strongest in these areas. Zaitsev wouldn’t waste his skills or endanger himself in losing battles.

 

Nikki turned down the lamp. What did the colonel mean, that all snipers were cowards? Even the Russians? Was Zaitsev a coward? He thought back to some of his own battles, others he’d observed for Ostarhild. He recalled the Red soldier who’d been shot while holding a flaming bottle of antitank fluid. The soldier dropped the bottle and was engulfed in flames. Knowing he was as good as dead, the man picked up another bottle, ran through his agony at a panzer and smashed the liquid against the radiator to ignite the tank. Where were the Russian cowards? He hadn’t seen one. The cowards had all died first. There couldn’t be any left.

 

Lying in the dark, his eyes riveted open, Nikki stared into his memories. His mind soared like a hawk above the past two months. The houses. The factories. The green Volga. He listened to his heartbeat: it was the beat of mortar shells. His breathing rasped like the gasps of the dying. The dark cold and silence of the basement were the thumb of death pressing down on him. His senses swirled. He felt not only like he was falling but as if he’d been hurled downward.

 

He sat up. He had to skid it all to a halt; the parade of violent scenes and numbing explosions was overwhelming him. He tumbled in the heart of a fireworks display; the memories were so bright, popping and crackling on all sides.

 

Stop, he thought, stop it. Where is sleep?

 

* * * *

 

NIKKI SAT UP IN THE DARKNESS TO THE SOUND OF footsteps from above. Ostarhild called out to alert Nikki that he was in the building. It was a precaution not for Nikki but for the officer.

 

He lit his lantern and carried it to the foot of the steps.

 

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant. Come in.”

 

Ostarhild walked down the steps. “I’m sorry to wake you, Nikki. I need you to take care of something for me.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Early tonight, five battalions of the Three thirty-sixth Pioneers arrived. Paulus is going to make another big push at the Barricades. A telephone cable has been broken between my office and the rail yard south of the Lazur plant. I need this line open with the Three thirty-sixth while they get into place.”

 

Nikki nodded.

 

“I’ve already sent one man out to fix it, but he disappeared. I’ve no idea what happened to him. He was a freshman private, so anything could’ve gone wrong. I thought I could let you rest, but now I’ve got to bother you.”

 

Ostarhild handed Nikki a flashlight. “Let’s go. This shouldn’t take you too long.”

 

Nikki set the lantern on the floor. He lit the flashlight to guide the officer up the steps. He left his rifle propped in the corner, where it had been for weeks.

 

Outside the office, Nikki threw the light’s beam onto the ground. Ostarhild pointed out the black wire running into an alley. These thick, coated wires had been rolled out from giant spools off the backs of trucks to establish phone links between headquarters while the German army consolidated its gains. Whenever possible, the wires were laid along walls or on the inside of train tracks for protection and camouflage. Occasionally the lines were strung on poles to lift them over roads.

 

Nikki pocketed a set of wire strippers and a roll of black electrician’s tape. Ostarhild patted him on the back.

 

“I’ve checked it to this point, Nikki. It’s broken out there somewhere. Be careful. Just find it, fix it, and get back.”

 

Nikki cast the beam on the wire and followed it into the alley. At the far end of the block, the wire rose up a flagpole and stretched across a street. He locked onto the wire with the flashlight and followed it, snaking through the city.

 

Walking, he kept alert. Even though this sector was well in the rear and the night was quiet, he was keenly aware that he was a German soldier strolling through the Russian dark behind a glaring flashlight.

 

Nikki kept his eyes on the wire, glancing only rarely at the shadowy ruins. He felt he had seen them all before, one just like another. Months ago, it had struck him how little character was left in this city that was Stalin’s namesake, which once must have been beautiful. When Nikki first saw Stalingrad in early September, the bombings and combat had already stripped its flesh, reducing it to piles of debris and gaunt, defiant facades. It was a wasteland, all of it looking the same, its agony spread evenly. Only the wide, jade Volga and the steppe beyond Mamayev Kurgan were worth looking at anymore.

 

He tracked the wire behind the remains of a warehouse. A half-dozen empty coal cars sat on tracks there, all of them perforated by bullet holes. Nikki moved into an open yard; he heard footsteps in the rubble. He flashed the beam at the first of the coal cars. A private walked from behind it, raising his hand in greeting. The man shrugged and pointed down at Nikki’s feet. Nikki aimed the beam down to the break in the wire. It had been cleanly severed, as if cut with a snipper.

 

What was this private doing? Nikki wondered. Had he wandered all the way out here and found he’d forgotten or lost his wire strippers or repair tape? Why hadn’t he just gone back? Maybe he knew someone else would come fix the wire and so waited for the next soldier, figuring it would be safer to walk back together. Whatever his reason, Nikki, a corporal who’d been yanked out of his rest before an important morning mission, was going to give this freshman an upbraiding he would remember.

 

Nikki knelt and pulled out his wire strippers. The private stayed where he was. Nikki flashed the light at him.

 

“Come over here and help me. I’ll show you how this is done, and then you’re going to do it. Come on.”

 

The little private shuffled over. The man’s coat hung on him loosely, and his pantaloons, baggy at the knees, were bunched over the boots. The leather sheath of a bone-handled knife hung from a belt lapped around the soldier’s waist.

 

That’s not his uniform, Nikki thought.

 

The private walked up and stood over Nikki. The man brought his thin, pale head down to Nikki’s eye level. Nikki raised the flashlight to look into his face.

 

The private grinned. His smile was golden.

 

* * * *

 

PAIN WAITED FOR NIKKI. HE THRASHED TO THE surface of consciousness, to a stab of white pain at the back of his neck. His hands would not move. Water flooded his nostrils and mouth.

 

His cheek stung suddenly. His head snapped to the right, flinging open his eyelids. His jawbone sizzled with ache. Nikki coughed out the water in his nose and throat. He blinked his eyes to dry his vision. A bright light sprang into his face.

 

Quickly his senses took hold. He was lying on his back. His hands and legs were bound. He opened his eyes wide, and the light blurred into a starburst. It was all he could see.

 

A hand reached out of the light to grab him by the collar and jerk him into a sitting position. The pain in his neck sank and spread over his shoulders. His ribs throbbed. He’d been kicked while unconscious.

 

The light lowered to the floor. His vision adjusted, and he saw three men, one wearing the baggy German uniform. This one stepped forward. He leaned his face close and smiled with a mouth decked with gold-capped teeth. He drew a long knife and laid the blade under Nikki’s chin. His face filled Nikki’s vision.

 

“There’s not a lot of time.” A gravelly voice from behind the light was speaking accented German. “This one wants to kill you. I’m going to let him do it unless you give me a reason not to.”

 

Nikki stared numbly into the face before him. The flashing yellow teeth disappeared behind thin lips. The man breathed loudly through his nose.

 

Nikki looked past the head in front of him into the shadows. From the spilling glow of the flashlight, he saw he was in one of the coal cars. These three were a commando team who’d sneaked over the line to capture and interrogate a prisoner. He could only guess how long they’d been waiting in the coal car. They’d snipped the telephone wire, then ambushed the freshman when he came out to fix it. They’ve killed him; now they have me, Nikki thought dully.

 

“You’ll kill me anyway,” he said.

 

The knife rolled under his chin. The blade scraped down his throat, over his Adam’s apple, then again under his jaw.

 

Nikki swallowed. He gave his name, rank, and serial number. The face in front of him looked deep into his eyes, like an attentive dog that did not understand.

 

”Corporal, let me make this easy for you,” the voice from behind the light said. “We know about the reinforcements moving into the Barricades. Several battalions. We’ve been watching them. And even though the lad who wandered out here before you was quite a nervous talker, he didn’t know anything of value. I suspect you do. Tell me something of value, Corporal. Now.”

 

Nikki felt the blade curl under his ear. A glimpse of gold shone through the lips floating in front of him. This man spoke in a hiss; blood dripped along Nikki’s neck from the slicing knife.

 

The interpreter said, “He wants you to know he will kill you in five more seconds. He says he wants to do it. I suggest you speak to me now, Corporal.”

 

Now, Nikki thought. Now, he said! My God, this is a death I wasn’t prepared for! My throat slit open, gasping for air, bound hand and foot like a slaughtered hog. Now! What can I tell them? Should I tell them? Tell them! Tell them what? What do I know? Value? What’s of value to these madmen? What do I know? Start talking, Nikki. Anything. Something will come out, something of value. No, be quiet! Traitors and cowards talk. Die, just die. It’s over. They’ll kill you anyway. Oh, God. Father.

 

The knife left Nikki’s throat. The face moved behind him. Nikki looked at the two standing men, specters in the downcast flashlight. They looked like all the other Russians he’d seen, in bulky padded coats, cartridge belts, and grenades slung about their bodies. Both wore the Russian fur hat, ear flaps tied up.

 

The light played again into his face, blinding him. The man with the knife laid his hand over Nikki’s eyes and nose and yanked back hard. Nikki’s neck stretched.

 

“Corporal,” the voice said, “we must leave now. I give you this chance.”

 

Nikki’s brain flooded. He sucked in breath, baring his teeth. His hands and legs were strapped, useless. It’s over. Over. There’s nothing to tell them. It’s nothing. All nothing.

 

A snarl escaped from his exposed throat when the blade was laid against it.

 

The light shut off.

 

Nikki relaxed.

 

Then, like a bullet, like an angel, a thought came to him.

 

“Thorvald.”

 

“Wait,” the voice said. “What was that?”

 

Nikki said again, “Thorvald. He’s here.”

 

The voice gave a command in Russian, and the light came back into Nikki’s eyes. The hand released its pull on his face.

 

“Tell me, Corporal. Who is Thorvald?”

 

Nikki closed his eyes to think. Tell them. It doesn’t matter. Thorvald’s just one man; you’re not giving away any big troop movements or secret plans. Tell them. It won’t help them.

 

“Thorvald,” he said, gasping, “is a colonel. An SS colonel. He was sent here from Berlin to kill one of your snipers.”

 

The voice gave another order in Russian. The gold-toothed executioner behind Nikki moved in front, turning the knife over and over in his hand.

 

“Which one of our snipers?” asked the voice.

 

Nikki blinked into the beam. “Zaitsev. The Hare.”

 

The Reds whispered in buzzing tones. The golden grin appeared close to Nikki’s face again, blocking the light. His eyes were intent and his head skewed, again like the attentive dog.

 

The grin spoke. “Otkuda ty znayesh pra Zaitseva?”

 

Another voice translated. “How do you know about Zaitsev?”

 

“He’s been written about in your newspapers. They tell us everything about him.”

 

The three conferred in whispers. The man in the German uniform pointed at Nikki with his knife several times. One head wagged back and forth. The other, the interpreter, stood still, listening to the arguments of the other two. The decision clearly belonged to this man.

 

The gold-toothed one knelt beside Nikki to stare into his profile. He leaned on his knife and twisted it into the floorboards.

 

“When did this SS colonel arrive?”

 

“Yesterday.”

 

“Is he good?”

 

Nikki nodded. The pain in his neck was rising again.

 

“He said he is. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him shoot. But he’s the head of the Berlin sniper school, the special one in Gnössen. The generals asked for him specifically. They flew him in to get Zaitsev. They say he’s the best. That’s all I know.”

 

“The head of the German sniper school?” The interpreter told this to his comrades. The gold-toothed man frowned and shook his head at Nikki’s ear.

 

The leader rubbed his stubbly chin. “Hmmm. That is interesting, Corporal.” His voice carried a musing tone. “A German supersniper, sent from Berlin to kill the Russian supersniper. Yes, that is interesting.”

 

He paused to fold his arms across his chest. “But I do not believe it is all you know.”

 

Nikki searched quickly for something more, any detail that might tip the scale. He’d just met Thorvald. He knew only what was discussed in Ostarhild’s office.

 

“He says he’s a coward. He wants me to be his guide.”

 

The interpreter laughed at this. He told the other two.

 

He motioned for the man beside Nikki to come. The two in Russian garb shouldered submachine guns while the grinning one in the German uniform hefted a long rifle with a telescopic sight and walked toward Nikki, holding the knife.

 

He reached down and cut Nikki’s hands free, leaving his feet bound. He leveled the barrel of the rifle at Nikki’s forehead and pulled back the bolt. A bullet popped into the air. His hand flicked out and caught it.

 

He dropped the shell down to Nikki.

 

“Vot, dai etomu trusu. A sledushuyu on poluchit v lob.”

 

He put the knife in its scabbard, then turned for the open sliding door of the coal car.

 

The interpreter stood before Nikki. He cut off the flashlight. In the darkness, the soldier spoke.

 

“He said, ‘Here, give this to the coward. The next one he gets will be in his forehead.’ Goodbye, Corporal.”

 

The Russians jumped out of the door.

 

Nikki untied the rope from his feet. Once free, he crawled to the door to stare into the shades of night, straining his senses for any trace of his captors in the rail yard. Faced with no other choice, he slid out of the car and walked into the open.

 

They’re gone, he thought. They left me alive.

 

Nikki blew out a breath. He stroked the warm metal of the Russian bullet in his hand. He pressed his index finger onto its point, feeling the ease with which it could pierce flesh. He dropped the bullet.

 

In the dark, on his hands and knees, he groped until he found his flashlight, wire strippers, and black tape in the dirt where he’d left them.

 

He repaired the break in the line through the throbbing in his head.

 

* * * *

 

TWELVE

 

 

HEINZ THORVALD OGLED HIS IMAGE IN THE HANDHELD mirror. This was his third morning in a row without shaving since he’d left Gnössen. Grow a beard while you’re here, he thought. That Russian wind has needles in it.

 

He looked at his naked body. He always slept nude. It felt warmer pulling the blankets around his bare legs and under his chin. He had slept well the previous night on the cot in the storeroom Ostarhild had prepared for him, but more from fatigue than comfort.

 

Thorvald set down the mirror. He rubbed his stomach with both hands. His white skin held a reddish cast, the scarlet hue of childhood freckles still visible from head to toe. His shoulders and chest were soft. A layer of fat cushioned the lines of his muscles and bones like a jacket of snow. His waistline seemed to pout as if it were sticking out a lip.

 

He slapped his belly and jiggled it once to tell it he was going to give it some bread and jelly out of his bag in a few minutes. He gathered up the fatigues Ostarhild had sent at his request and pulled them on.

 

An opened wooden crate rested at the foot of the cot. Thorvald reached through the straw packing and lifted the canvas sack containing the new Mauser Kar 98K. He slid the rifle from the sack and undid the factory wrapping of oil paper. He felt the slickness of the packing grease and oil, the smell as sweet to him as morning coffee.

 

Thorvald broke the gun down, the stock, the bolt, the trigger assembly. He had an orderly bring him a basin of hot soapy water, then placed the parts in the suds. He shook out the canvas sack to rid it of straw and dust and laid it across the bed. After wiping the rifle parts down with clean rags, he set each on the sack and gave the metal bits a light coat of gun oil. He held the barrel up to the window and peered down it. Deep in the center was a single speck of dust, like a lone camel in a vast blue and perfect desert. Thorvald swabbed it out, looked again, and set the barrel on the sack.

 

He reassembled the rifle and washed his hands. He took off the oily fatigues and threw them in a corner. From his duffel bag he arrayed his clothes on the bed, dressing slowly, donning first his winter undergarments. He enjoyed the gathering warmth of each article: black cotton socks, gray-green woolen pantaloons, black wool turtleneck and large-cord sweater, then his insulated high boots. Last, he took out the reversible padded coat and hood, green on one side, white on the other. His white mittens were inside the pockets. He unrolled a pair of reversible drawstring pants and tossed them on the bed beside the coat.

 

After savoring three slices of pumpernickel slathered with Black Forest cherry jam from his duffel, he took up a small chamois sack holding his Zeiss 6X telescopic sight with crosshair reticle. He locked the scope into place.

 

Thorvald pulled on the pants and parka, white side out. Dressed and fed, he rubbed the blond stubble on his chin. They’ll ask at the opera about the beard, he thought. I’ll tell them I grew it on a mission to the Eastern Front.

 

He walked into the hall carrying the Mauser and a box of shells. He passed Ostarhild’s office, looking in for a moment to find the lieutenant away. He noted that the brazier and the coffeepot were also gone. The lieutenant’s desk was a mess.

 

Outside, the first charcoal stains of dawn colored the sky. It’s going to be a heavily overcast day, he thought. Good. They tend to be warmer. The clouds keep the heat in.

 

He counted only ten soldiers walking in the square across from the department store and in the streets around him. No cars or motorcycles broke the early silence. He wondered that there was not more activity, though he knew he was for the most part a stranger to the administration of war. In fact, he did not know how it worked on the large scale, outside the narrow range of his crosshairs.

 

Heinz Thorvald had never played more than a very specific role in the German military. He’d been a prized sniper, a gifted Scharfschütze, from the first day he donned the black and silver of the Wehrmacht as a twenty-seven-year-old captain in 1933.

 

Before his fifteenth birthday, Heinz had been a champion youth marksman in his native Berlin. His father, Baron Dieter von Zandt Thorvald, was a renowned sportsman in the southern forests. The old man had once hunted duck and quail with Field Marshal von Hindenburg himself. Heinz grew up a member of the wealthy industrialist Krupp family, his mother’s clan, who held license to hunting grounds throughout Bavaria, and Heinz had been recognized early as a phenom with a shotgun.

 

But the boy’s passion was not in the fields alongside his father. The baying of the hunting dogs, the wet dawns in the marshes, and the gritty, bloody meat of the wild kill were not to his liking. Instead, his heart beat for the time he could spend on the shooting range. He preferred the camaraderie and comfort of the clubhouse, the applause of admirers, and the competition with his peers. His favorite afternoons came with the matches against those elder marksmen who wished to teach the talented pup a lesson and rarely did. Heinz won most of the competitions he entered from the ages of sixteen through twenty. The matches he lost did more to improve his shooting than his victories. He analyzed every errant shot down to painful detail and did not repeat those mistakes next time out.

 

As a young man, he turned his talents to trap shooting. His rifle of choice was the unpopular .410 small-bore rather than the more widely used 12 gauge. The shot pattern of the .410 was smaller. This rifle required more meticulous aim than the larger-bore guns. Heinz accepted this voluntarily as his handicap. In his mind, it evened the contests. It helped him focus his will. The 12 gauge destroyed the clay targets, turning them into sprinkles of dust. Heinz enjoyed using the .410 to simply break the clays, then watch them fall. He sometimes practiced by shattering with a second shot a falling piece of an already stricken target. No one in Germany could best Heinz. His movement from high to low targets was as smooth as the flights of the spinning clays themselves. His balance was remarkable, and his reflexes were like a mousetrap. The clays were flung into the air at the call of “pull” for a high target and “mark” for a low one. Heinz moved the barrel of the gun in behind, then ahead, of the “pigeons” sailing twenty meters away from him in the first second, fifty meters away after three seconds. He knocked them down as surely as if the disks had been flung against a wall.

 

In 1928, when he was twenty-two, a wave of strikes shuddered through Germany. From his family’s estate outside Berlin, Heinz sensed the unrest growing in the nation. His father, a veteran of the First World War, was a strong supporter of the military. Many times he told his son that the German army was the last lamp that could light the country’s path back to its former glories.

 

The baron joined a militant group of veterans, the Stahlhelme, or “Steel Helmets,” and marched with them in the Berlin streets against the encroachments of unemployment, the declining mark, the Weimar republican system, and the rising tide of Communism. He preached that the German people’s most valuable traits were their industriousness and the skill of the labor force. Because of what he saw as the Weimar politicians’ mishandling of the postwar peace, German workers were being laid off by the thousands. The nation was depressed. Its anchor of hard labor and daily production had been ripped from the shoal beneath, sending Germany adrift, the baron intoned often at dinner. Only a strong army could sink the anchor back into a firm purchase.

 

Heinz accompanied his father on a few of the Stahlhelme’s raucous, confrontational demonstrations. The rancor of the crowd scared him, and he quickly retired to the sanctuary of his library and the rifle range.

 

Five years later, in 1933, the Austrian Adolf Hitler came to power. The year before, Hitler had been at the forefront in the Nazi party’s election sweep. Hitler was now chancellor. His brown-shirted storm troopers, the Sturmabteilung, lock-stepped across the nation, which embraced the new nationalism. Hitler labeled both the Communists and the “Jewish terror” as the genesis of Germany’s woes.

 

In the first year under Hitler, Germany’s economy began to lurch forward like an engine that had sat idle for years and was suddenly oiled and cranked into action. The voices of dissent slowly disappeared when the Schutzstaffel, the SS, opened the first internment camps for political opponents. The nation began to shout as one, howling first at itself, then to the startled ears of the world. The voices in the streets were young with the renewed power of Germany rising again.

 

Heinz was enlisted by his father into the National Socialist Party, the Nazis. He was immediately scooped up by friends into the storm troopers. Hitler called this paramilitary organization, over half a million strong, his “political soldiers in the fight to take back the streets from the Marxists.” Heinz was subjected, through meetings and retreats, to an armylike discipline. He was ushered into the labyrinths of Hitler’s political aims and social suspicion of any thing or person termed “non-Aryan.”

 

Heinz became upset by the fervor of his mates. The storm troopers fought in the streets with fists and bottles against Communist sympathizers. They marched in rigid goose step in support of Hitler’s mad dashes through the halls of government. They were arrested for fighting, then smashed benches and threw telephones through the windows at the police stations. Heinz could not join in the violence. He was stalled by a fear he did not know he owned until the first time his mates rushed into a crowd of Reds. He’d stood on the edge of the melee, frozen on the sidewalk, pressed against a building by his sudden dread. He quit the brownshirts two months after joining and was branded a coward.

 

The baron was not willing to accept this label for his son and insisted that the error had been his. The storm troopers, he said, were simply too proletarian. Heinz was refined beyond the ken of those goons. The place for Heinz was the Jungdeutsche Orden, the German Youth Order, known as the Jungdo.

 

Here, young Heinz found an ideological home for the sons of the bourgeoisie. The Jungdo marched in goose step, but only because it was the fashion and they didn’t want to appear less committed to the National Socialist cause than the other groups. But unlike the Hitler Youth or the storm troopers, the Jungdo did not break ranks to run down a group of men and women carrying Communist slogans or throw rocks and bottles at Bolshevik speakers. Their uniforms carried no insignia or rank to deemphasize age and status. Instead of the storm troopers’ beer-sotted revelry, his group held brotherly and patriotic meetings. The members of the Jungdo carried themselves with the air of those bred to lead rather than skirmish. Heinz spent weekends on camping trips, engaged in sports and hikes. The Jungdo had a required reading list that closely tracked Hitler’s preferred authors. Heinz was introduced to the great philosopher Nietzsche’s belief that a self-willed, heroic superrace would emerge above conventional morality to sweep away worldly decadence. In Schopenhauer’s The World as Free Will, one of Hitler’s favorite bits of reading during World War I, Heinz encountered the idea of will as force. He marveled at the lessons of Darwinian selection and the unexpected parallels between math, physics, culture, and history set forth by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West.

 

Heinz’s enthusiasm for Hitler’s vision of Germany grew while he came to understand the influences behind the Führer’s ideas. Under the guidance of Jungdo speakers and late-night discussions with comrades, he realized the danger of the Red peril. He saw the Jew merchant as the throttling purse strings of an Aryan nation striving for economic daylight.

 

During the summer of 1933, Heinz’s life was filled with a sense of belonging he had not known before joining the Nazis. Though his family had always been a loving one and both his parents were children of wealth, Heinz had long walked only in the shadows of that love and privilege. He, like the other children of the estates, had become too accustomed to his position; he could no longer feel his life. If nothing else, he had this in common with the blue-collar workers and farm boys swelling the ranks of the storm troopers and Hitler Youth. The economy had slowed to such a crawl that the German youth felt isolated from itself. Their hopes and dreams had been mortgaged and their destinies shackled to the wreckage of the country’s past. This was not the same past their parents remembered, the age of imperial Germany. Rather, the young men and women of 1933 Germany had grown up in the decades after World War I, after defeat and shame, in a Germany now mired in a worldwide depression.

 

There had been no intellectual or philosophical harbor for him before the Jungdo. He’d read books, listened dutifully to speeches, and wandered thoughtfully through the wildflowers and fields, like the rest of his breed. But most of his opinions were ones he’d usurped from his father. Now, through his nightly classes, he was versed in German folklore. He was conversant in the words of Thomas Mann as well as the soaring rhetoric of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He attended the riveting spectacles of Wagner’s operas. He stood rapt in the middle of tens of thousands outside the capitol, the Reichstag, listening to Joseph Goebbels cry for “the struggle for Berlin.” He marched with his father and a quarter million Stahlhelme through the Brandenburg Gate, flying the swastika and eagle standards beneath the stare of the Führer himself. Just as his body had found the sporting regimen of trap and target shooting, his mind found Hitler.

 

Before the Jungdo, there had been no spot on earth other than the shooting range Heinz Thorvald could claim to have truly made his own. He’d been a stranger to Germany all his life, invisible and disenfranchised.

 

Now he felt like an heir to the planet.

 

In November of 1933, his father approached him with news. The baron had secured for his son a captain’s rank in the SS, the Nazi Party’s own armed forces. His assignment would be as an ordnance officer, attached to the armory in Berlin. The Baron assured Heinz that his peacetime duties would include little more than participating on the SS’s sharpshooting team and putting on displays of marksmanship for recruitment festivals. Heinz embraced his father and accepted.

 

For six years, SS Captain Heinz Thorvald developed his marksmanship skills. During the week, he refined the static shot, lengthening his distance eventually to one thousand meters with a 6X scope. On weekends, he honed his skills on the skeet field, swinging the heavier duck guns; he won dozens of contest and awards for the SS. Evenings were spent among books or attending the opera, especially those by Wagner.

 

There had been some women in Heinz’s life. Their chief purpose had been to admire his manner. The prospect of loving a woman and sharing himself scared him; he used his loyalty to the Aryan cause to silence the whispers of worry and fright inside him. “The world,” he told each woman when her string had run out, “is not right just yet for commitment to other than the Fatherland.” Sipping a coffee and cognac after an evening at the opera, he told the girls the times were turbulent and tumbling.

 

“Not now,” he’d sigh, looking away. “Maybe ... I don’t know.”

 

Nineteen forty-one marked his eighth year in the army. Though Germany had been at war for two years, Heinz had spent only ten weeks on actual battlefields, in two campaigns: the invasion of Poland, where he’d sat at six hundred meters, knocking off frightened, defeated Poles across open battlefields, and Dunkirk, shooting a hundred retreating English and French soldiers waiting for rescue over the English Channel. In each case, Thorvald had fired with impunity from remarkable distances, confident that no marksman on the other side could counter him or even endanger him. In Poland and France, he’d collected over three hundred confirmed kills. He was ever thankful to be so safe in war, to be a sniper.

 

His impressive number of kills combined with his family’s influence to secure for him a promotion to colonel. By the summer of 1941, the German war effort in Europe had shifted to the occupations of conquered nations and the relentless bombing of Britain. Very little ground action was taking place on the continent. Thorvald agreed to head a sniper school outside Berlin in the small town of Gnössen. He had SS engineers construct a state-of-the-art shooting range and skeet field, touting that skill in both disciplines was needed for accurate as well as fast aim. Thorvald hoped he would spend the duration of the war in Gnössen. He’d breakfast with his father on Sundays and spend his week creating lethal snipers to go into conflict and perform bravely on his behalf. He set himself the task of becoming too useful as a teacher to be sent into the field again.

 

Now the frosty Stalingrad wind slapped him out of his reverie, stirring again the sad sense in his breast that some promise had been broken. He stared down the steps of the river walk to the green Volga. The river was clotted with ghosts of ice floating under the surface. No boats are coming across that, he thought. Ostarhild told me about the Russians’ supply crisis. I’m here during a lull in the fighting, but it’s bound to increase the moment the Volga freezes and becomes first a giant footbridge and then a highway for the Reds’ supplies. I want Zaitsev dead and a seat on a plane home well before that.

 

To the left of the steps were the ruins of shops; across the walkway were the remains of a row of statues and concrete fountains. All but one of the iron figures had been broken and knocked from their stands. At the end of the row, just before the cluttered boardwalk beside the Volga, stood a depiction of a Russian boy and girl. They held a sheaf of straw over their heads, the workers of the Soviet future. They seemed to Thorvald to be four hundred meters away.

 

He took the rifle off his shoulder, looked down the scope, and added one-eighth for the shot downhill. Sensing the chilly clarity of the air, he subtracted twenty meters. The wind blew at him off the Volga, ruffling his hair under the white hood. Possibly eight knots. He gave the distance ten meters more.

 

Thorvald crouched and brought the crosshairs onto the dark forehead of the iron statue boy. He aimed for the left eye and squeezed. The report of the rifle roared at the quiet facades on his left, then bounced back and raced past into the open park. It was his first shot in Stalingrad.

 

He shortened his distance slightly when a trough in the wind appeared. He aimed and fired at the statue’s right eye. Looking through the sight, he could not determine his accuracy. Iron boys, he thought, do not fall down from bullets.

 

Thorvald walked down the path to the statue. From this height above the river, he could see the huge islands splitting the Volga in half. Beyond the wide sand beach and evergreens on the islands were the flat plains of Russia, rolling away under the distant winter mist. He thought about how vast this land was. It could encompass Germany twenty times. He’d heard Hitler’s plans for Russia, announced from a hundred podiums. He enjoyed watching Hitler shout his speeches, fists waving, beating his buttons, shaking while the words flew from his mouth as though he were a cannon and the words artillery shells. We will conquer Russia west of the Volga, then Moscow will sue for peace and the war will end. We will call the land from Poland stretching east to the Volga “Ostland.” We will be its masters and populate it with our race. The Russians, the lowly Untermenschen, will serve us grapes and honey and chop wheat for our bread.

 

When I leave, Thorvald thought, I won’t come back, even when it is Ostland. I don’t like this place, this gloom, this wind.

 

Standing before the statue, Thorvald stepped over the low marble wall onto the fountain floor. A gown of snow from the night before lay on the bottom, making the surface slippery. He slid up to the figure of the boy and ran his finger over the ebony left eye. A gray smudge came off on his finger. The copper jacket of the round had flattened upon impact with the harder iron. The muddy smear was a splash mark from the lead core. He checked the other eye and found the lead mark low on the cheek. The rifle is true enough, he thought.

 

Waiting at the top of the steps was the soldier he had requested that Ostarhild assign to him.

 

“Good morning, Corporal,” he said. “How did you sleep?”

 

“Sir?” The young man seemed taken aback by the question.

 

“Just an inquiry. Manners. Like ‘How’s the weather?’ “

 

The corporal reached for Thorvald’s rifle.

 

“Yes, sir. I didn’t sleep that well. The lieutenant sent me out in the middle of the night to repair a phone line.”

 

“Was it close to the Russian lines?”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Did you repair it?”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Were you scared?”

 

The corporal shook his head and spit in the dirt. “I’m always scared, Colonel. You get that way here.”

 

Thorvald walked alongside him into the street, north toward the Russian lines.

 

“Why aren’t you carrying your rifle?”

 

“I figured today we were just going to look the front lines over, sir. If you want, I’ll go get it.”

 

Thorvald shook his head. “No. Don’t worry. We won’t get close enough to the Reds to get in any trouble. Let this Zaitsev work along the front lines with his balls in the mud. From the articles I read, he seems to be addicted to it. Besides,” he added, clapping the boy on the shoulder, “I don’t need to be so close to him as he needs to be to me.”

 

The two walked in silence through the ruins. The corporal seemed quite certain of where he was going and knew the best routes to get there. Thorvald marveled at the destruction of the city. This was devastation, absolute and complete. There was nothing left whole. The buildings were mangled, ripped apart. Who could fight in this? Who could hold out through this?

 

The Russian wind seemed to say to him, I can. Thorvald huddled into his coat.

 

He waved his white-gloved hand at the ruins. “Where do you think he is, Corporal?”

 

Mond spread a map of the city on the ground. The colonel knelt beside him.

 

“Look here, sir. We’ve split the Russian force into three parts.” Mond sketched with his finger three rings on the map.

 

“Here,” he said as he pointed into the first, northernmost circle, “in Rynok above the Tractor Factory, they’ve got a full division. South of there, in the Red October factory, we’ve fought right through the middle of them all the way to the Volga, isolating this force.” He jabbed the finger down into the Red October circle. “This small pocket deep in the shops is almost impossible to break.”

 

Mond looked up from the map. “I’ve seen the Russians take artillery pieces apart in there, drag them through the rubble to the front line, then put them back together and blow us to bits.”

 

The corporal laid his fingertip on the southeast corner of the Red October. He traced a line west from the building to the eastern slope of Mamayev Kurgan, the hill that commanded a view of the city. From there, he slid his hand south to encompass the Lazur chemical plant, the rail yards, and ten kilometers of riverfront to a point north of the main landing stage.

 

Thorvald looked up from the map into the top of Mond’s head. The corporal did not take his eyes from the map.

 

“Where is he, Corporal?”

 

“My guess is he’s in this southern pocket, the largest one.”

 

“Why do you think he’s there?”

 

“It’s just a guess, but it gives him the most room to move, the most targets. He could get trapped in one of these smaller pockets. And I don’t think they would want that. Besides, it’s mostly a stalemate right now in these smaller areas. Zaitsev has over a hundred and forty kills. I think he’d want to work where he can find the most game.”

 

“Game? Why do you say game?”

 

Mond shrugged as if to express how simple the logic was.

 

“He’s a hunter from Siberia. That’s how he thinks. He hunts. Sir, did you read the articles from In Our Country’s Defense?”

 

Thorvald nodded. “Yes, Corporal, some. Not all of them. I perused them. Let’s say I got the highlights.”

 

The corporal lowered his eyes.

 

Thorvald responded quickly. “I’ll read them all, I assure you. I was tired yesterday.”

 

“It’s all right. They’re mostly brag.”

 

“You say Zaitsev sees us as game. I take it you’ve read the articles. What kind of game are we to him?”

 

Mond studied the question, then answered. “Wolves. Siberian timber wolves. He thinks he’s got us figured out. The Germans do this, the Germans do that. He reads tactics and routines like tracks, like we’re animals.”

 

“Then,” Thorvald said, rising, “we will behave like Siberian timber wolves. We’ll be dangerous but conventional. We’ll let him think he has us figured out. And then we’ll spring a surprise on him.”

 

Thorvald smiled, liking what he was creating for the young corporal. After all, Zaitsev was right. The German sharpshooters were predictable. Thorvald knew it; he’d been the instructor for many of the snipers Zaitsev killed. He was certain they’d behaved like animals here in Stalingrad: dull and predictable. He’d seen it in their eyes while training them in Gnössen, the careless Aryan confidence of the Nazi youth, boys ruling the world before they’d fired the first shot. No respect for the enemy. No longer any respect for the power of fear. They’d fought in the streets with knuckles and beer bottles and considered those city squabbles to be their crucibles, their proof under fire. These young snipers entered the war already sure they were brave, convinced that the world waited to open before their courage like gates to a password. “Just show me how to do it” was all they seemed to want from him in training—”I’ll take care of the rest, old man.” They’d forgotten that fear, not the bullet or the bomb, is the most devastating weapon of war.

 

Hitler has taken fear away from the German people, Thorvald thought; that’s the Führer’s greatest power. He’s almost done that for me, almost freed me from it.

 

“And this Zaitsev,” he mused while Mond folded the map. “We’ll treat him like a duck. We’ll hide ourselves in a blind and then flush him into the open. We’ll make him fly from fright and then shoot him down in a burst of feathers.”

 

Thorvald looked at the corporal, who turned to walk north toward the Lazur plant and no-man’s-land.

 

“I’m certain we can make Zaitsev come to us.”

 

Mond nodded.

 

“The key,” he said, “is to let him know I’m here.”

 

The corporal’s face dropped. “How . . .” The boy hesitated. “How can we do that, Colonel?”

 

“Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll think of something, you and I.”

 

* * * *