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on the other hand, the Führer would congratulate him. Personally. And give him a medal. For he would have helped save Germany.
    The boy glanced down at his Hitler Youth uniform. He rubbed the brass belt buckle with the back of his sleeve. Then he took off his crusher cap and looked at the badge. He began polishing the buttons on his blouson.
    Yevgeny Lebedintsev grinned as he watched the boy through the telescopic sight of his Mosinka sniper rifle. He had been watching him for more than an hour, ever since he had slithered along the upper floor of the abandoned warehouseand taken up his position covering the square. When the first friendly tank approached the turning he would have to take the boy out. It would make him sad to shoot such a young boy, but it was his duty. Take him out earlier and another would replace him, but possibly in a less amenable position. This Yevgeny could not countenance. It might lose his people a Betushka or, God forbid, a T-34. And such tanks, in the battle for Berlin, could mean the difference between stalemate and victory. Meanwhile Yevgeny would wait and see if a better target came along first. If that happened he could spare the boy with a clear conscience.
    The boy reminded him of his younger brother, Valentin. Valentin was thirteen. He was the apple of their mother’s eye. If the war ran on for another two years and Valentin was taken as a soldier, their mother would pine away. It was as simple as that. So it was Yevgeny’s duty to foreshorten the war as far as it was in his power to do so. To this end he had killed 143 men. Of these, 117 had been in Stalingrad, the remainder in the seemingly endless run-up to the battle for Berlin. His teacher, Vasya Zaytsev, whom they all looked up to, had killed many more: 257 in total. But 143 was good. Good enough for one of the master’s zaichata – one of Vasya’s ‘leverets’, as his sniper students were called.
    Yevgeny caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He waited ten seconds, and then swivelled his head at considerably less than what Vasya used to call the ‘speed of a rutting tortoise’. He saw the SS lieutenant colonel dart from one ruined doorway to another. Yevgeny swore under hisbreath, but the expletive stemmed more from astonishment than anger. What was a shit-kicker SS officer with a briefcase and no weapon in his hand doing alone on the battlefield? Collecting for the German Red Cross?
    Yevgeny inched the Mosinka round so that the 3.5 power PU fixed-focus sights bracketed the last doorway which the shit-kicker had entered. He waited with indrawn breath.
    The officer burst from the doorway and Yevgeny shot him. The shit-kicker spun wildly round and plunged back through the threshold.
    â€˜Fucking acrobat.’ Yevgeny checked the ground outside the doorway through his telescopic sight. Yes. There were gouts of blood on the ground. The bastard was probably lung shot. He wouldn’t last long.
    The boy sprinted through Yevgeny’s field of vision, almost slipping on the blood, and then disappeared into the doorway. Yevgeny grunted. ‘You’re a brave little squirrel.’ He had already reloaded. The good news was that the boy had abandoned his Panzerfaust, so that danger was at least past.
    Inside the ruined house the boy crouched over the wounded officer. ‘Sir. Sir. What can I do?’
    Obersturmbannführer Baldur Pfeidler knew that he had only minutes left to live. The sniper had got him through both lungs. Already the pain of breathing was threatening to make him delirious. He coughed up some blood. It tasted like the scrapings from a metal pannikin. It struck him as strange that his body could change from functional to dysfunctional in the space of a few seconds.
    â€˜Your name?’
    â€˜Scheuer, sir.’
    â€˜Age?’
    â€˜Seventeen, sir.’
    â€˜Don’t shit with me, boy. I haven’t the time.’
    â€˜Fourteen,