Free War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] by David Robbins Page B

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