Mack, David - The Midnight Front by Mack David

Author:Mack, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

31

OCTOBER

After more than two months of urban combat, little remained of Stalingrad but a maze of ruins, yet the fight to control it slogged on. Everyone, including Anja, knew why: Not only was the city vital to the control of oil resources in the Caucasus, it had propaganda value because it bore the name of the Soviet premier. For the sake of morale, the Red Army couldn’t let it fall to the Germans; for the sake of regional dominance, the Germans couldn’t afford not to capture it. And so the battle dragged on, one building and street at a time, day after bloody day.

In spite of bombings and shellings, the skeletons of large structures towered over the devastation. Much of the city’s street grid remained recognizable because buildings erected during the previous two decades tended to collapse inward on their own architectural footprints. Even so, heaps of rubble and debris littered the once wide-open boulevards, providing cover to guerrilla fighters and impeding the movements of the Nazis’ feared panzer divisions.

Smoke often obscured the worst of the devastation, but there was no escaping it. Coated in a film of pulverized concrete, the German and Russian armies both had taken on the pallor of ghosts haunting the city’s remains, distinguishable from rats and stray dogs only by their size and their infrequent habit of moving on two legs when the absence of sniper fire permitted it—which was not very often, thanks to Premier Stalin’s long record of advocating that every Russian be, first and foremost, a sharpshooter.

It was an edict Anja had grown up with, and one she had taken to heart.

No one had asked her many questions when she’d volunteered for the Red Army three months earlier. The city had been in chaos. Civilians were being evacuated in droves as troops arrived in battalions, all of them underfed and poorly equipped. Everything had been in short supply, and still was: uniforms, boots, rifles, ammunition, food, medicine, shelter.

Survival hinged on adaptation. Soldiers who hadn’t been given rifles followed those who had into combat; if an armed soldier fell, an unarmed comrade picked up the weapon and carried on. Troops traded clothing, mixing and matching uniform pieces until they found some that fit. Boots, though—the only way to get a decent pair was to take them off the dead. Now winter was imminent, which meant this Hell on earth was doomed to freeze over, and neither Anja nor any of her comrades could find a warm coat literally to save their lives.

That was a problem for tomorrow.

Anja was proud of what she’d done this night. While her comrades skulked through the shattered remnants of the city, she had soared above it, disguised as a humble pigeon thanks to the charm of ANDREALPHUS. From high overhead, a tiny speck passing through rising columns of smoke and ash, she had observed the latest round of Nazi troop movements. Three companies from the German Sixth Army were flanking wide to the south in search of a

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