Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (novels to read .txt) 📕

long interview Nehmann had done with one of these magicians, had been a Goebbels favourite. The man, now sadly dead, had ended the interview with a quote Nehmann would remember for a very long time. My job, he’d said, is to make the cleanest of kills on the dirtiest of battlefields. Perfect.

‘I know two,’ Schultz said at last, ‘who’d gladly do it. One of them lost his brother to the Gestapo. An SS Standartenführer would make a very acceptable target.’

‘And the other?’

‘He owes me a very big favour. You’ll love the man.’

*

His name was Schmidt. He was small, even smaller than Nehmann, and he had a smile that must have won him an assortment of beautiful women. With the smile went a peaceable acceptance that life was always going to be shit in this war, and that once you understood that, then neither Stalingrad, nor the weather, nor the Ivans, nor any other of the torments of this hideous city mattered in the slightest.

Schmidt was here to master the challenge of the long-distance ambush, to plot the rise and fall of his bullet, to take into account a breath or two of God’s wind, and finally – if he got everything exactly right – to watch the face in his telescopic sight explode. It seemed that the latter image, a thin film of crimson that hung in the air after the body had dropped, had become a bit of an obsession. That may or may not have been true, but it was said that Schmidt always slept with a smile on his face; after getting to know him a little, Schultz believed he knew the reason why. The man was an artist.

The favour, according to Schultz, had to do with Schmidt’s sister. She lived in Berlin. She was as small as her brother and – said Schmidt – perfectly formed in every respect. She’d attracted a number of admirers and one of the least welcome and most persistent had been a highly placed diplomat in Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry. The man had used his standing to make life deeply uncomfortable for little Hannelore, and Schultz, in turn, had used an Abwehr colleague to warn him off.

‘He has a name? This man you want me to kill?’ Schmidt had paid the bus depot a visit.

‘Kalb,’ Nehmann said. ‘And please don’t kill him. A knee shot is all we need.’

‘Range?’

‘Six hundred metres. I paced it out.’

‘No problem. Right knee? Left knee? You have a preference?’

Schultz was sitting with them. The question made him laugh. Nehmann, on the other hand, gave it some thought.

‘Left knee,’ he said. ‘That’s the one he dreams of bending if he’s ever awarded the Ritterkreuz.’

*

The next three days, while the roar of Soviet artillery grew louder and the slender thread of resupply flights threatened to break entirely, Nehmann made his way to the empty stretch of steppe in Tsarytsin. On each outing he wore a different set of clothes in case anyone was watching. On foot, especially when the going got treacherous, the journey seemed to last forever, and on the third morning, when heavy snow arrived, he had to depend on the handful of waypoints that were already familiar. Three eyeless horse cadavers, blown apart by the same shell. An abandoned tank, the lid of its turret still open. The frozen body of a young girl with blonde plaits, inexplicably undamaged, her tiny ears full of snowflakes.

Once he’d found the frozen stream, Nehmann made himself as comfortable as he could, belly down on the freezing gravel bank, only his head exposed. The binoculars belonged to Schultz, who’d stolen them from a captured Russian tank commander, and the optics, Nehmann thought, were a tribute to Soviet science. From his perch beside the stream, he tried to put himself in the head of a sniper, and as the hours ticked slowly by, his admiration for Schmidt’s patience grew and grew.

Despite five layers of clothing, he was freezing cold, a deep chill that had stolen into the very middle of him. He had two pairs of gloves but after a while even holding the binoculars steady became impossible. His teeth ached. His nose was full of icicles. How would you manage with a sniper rifle? How could you possibly keep something as small as a knee in the scope under these conditions?

On the first day, to his astonishment, a thin bundle of fur emerged from nowhere. It was a hare. Nehmann tried to track it through the binoculars as it hopped around, suddenly pausing, erect, attentive. Did it hear the Russians coming? Did it feel the shake of the earth as yet another shell exploded in the middle of nowhere? Would it be a pair of gloves by the time spring arrived, and the melt came, and the city began to smell like the abattoir it had already become?

At the well, very little happened. Civilians appeared, mainly women, not very many and not very often. On the first two days, there was no sight of the long Russian greatcoat, and it was only on the third day, after the snowstorm had gone, that Kalb paid the well a visit.

It was mid-afternoon. Kalb was carrying what looked like a canvas bucket. He attached it to a rope and lowered it into the well. The bad news was that he was gone within a minute. The good news was that he seemed to favour the side of the well that faced the stream, thus presenting his back to Schmidt’s rifle. But how on earth do you gauge the whereabouts of a knee beneath an ankle-length coat?

‘Leave it to me.’ Schmidt, that same night, seemed untroubled. ‘You want him crippled but alive? My pleasure.’

Nehmann said he was grateful. He’d finally thawed out and when the little sniper disappeared into the night he retreated to the bare comforts of the basement storage where he slept. He’d been back in Stalingrad now for nearly two weeks. He’d done his best to put Berlin, all of Berlin,