The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 19: The Organ-Grinder

Petr, Karen, and Anton used the cover of darkness to descend the River Volga's steep bank. They tossed buckets into the river's current and dragged them back with ropes. The water was murky and topped with a viscous film, industrial waste spilled into the river from broken factories and sunken ferries. But they poured the toxic water over each other's heads, anyway, and it proved remarkably effective at removing the sewage from their skin and clothes. When they were done, they smelled distinctly of gasoline, which the considered far preferable to their previous odor of a cesspit.

They returned to Pavlov's House and spent the night sopping wet. They had no spare uniforms, and there was no privacy. Sergeant Pavlov's men had smashed down the apartment's inner walls to facilitate movement and communication during combat. So, there was no separate room where Petr and his companions could have waited naked in seclusion while their clothes dried. Even the basement was occupied by a half-dozen children who had returned after dark.

Somehow the children had scrounged a bag of flour, a bag of rice and a box of saltine crackers. The oldest girl, Natasha, cooked for both the children and the soldiers, adding a carefully horded bullions cube to the boiling rice, giving it a meaty flavor.

By midnight both the children and Pavlov's platoon were fast asleep with full bellies. Petr, Karen and Anton were too uncomfortable to sleep in their wet clothes. So, they volunteered for guard duty.

They spent the night whispering to each other, helping Petr compose letters of condolences to the families of Josef, Martin, and the other soldiers' next of kin. It was a solemn duty, but surprisingly, it wasn't depressing. It felt good, even uplifting, to remember their compatriots and honor their heroic deaths. Petr couldn't help but wonder if anyone would be left alive to write a personal account of his own death, or if his father would be forced to read a form letter of condolences like so many others.

Petr kept the thought to himself.

The German attack came at dawn. It was led by a platoon of Panzer III's, sleek, compact, and long-barreled tanks that reminded Petr of a hunched cat stalking a mouse. Their treads rolled effortlessly over Stalingrad's rubble, mounting hills and traversing trenches with gravity-defying grace.

Petr alerted Pavlov of the tanks' approach, and Pavlov, in turn, set about waking his platoon. The well-motivated troops didn't waste much time scrambling to their positions. Riflemen dragged crates of ammunition up to the machinegun nests. Three more soldiers carefully loaded and aimed the 45mm cannon, hidden in a storage shed connected to the apartment by a camouflaged trench. One soldier hid himself in a sniper's nest on the apartment's second floor, where he brandished a Simonov anti-tank rifle.

Petr was familiar with the Simonov. It was very similar to the PTRD anti-tank rifle he'd trained with on the northern front. The only functional difference was that his old PTRD was bolt-action, and the Simonov was semi-automatic.

Petr ordered Karen to the basement, where she set up a triage unit, recruiting Natasha and the two other oldest children as nurses. He directed Anton to lie down beside one of the light machine gunners, ordering him to take over operation of the weapon if Pavlov's man was killed. Then Petr did the same with the Simonov gunner, lying down next to him, his binoculars already in hand.

Petr raised the spyglasses over his eyes and began to study the enemy through 8x magnification. "This is going to be easy," Petr encouraged Sabgaida, the Simonov gunner. He was a short, dark, and dour young man, a fresh recruit called up in June and so one year Petr's junior.

"Not if this can't penetrate the front armor," Sabgaida replied skeptically, referring to the Simonov rifle.

"Don't shoot at the front armor," Petr advised, "shoot at the commanders." It was a hard-learned lesson Petr had received while fighting for 2nd Shock Army on the Leningrad front. Tank drivers and gunners had very restricted fields of fire through their periscopes and viewports. They relied on tank commanders, who sat up, exposed in open hatches, for direction. If they could frighten the commanders into closing their hatches – "buttoning up" – they'd have a significant advantage.