War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] Read Free

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