The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 32: The Correspondent

Sgt. Pavlov was a quiet, unassuming man. His round face wore an expression of boredom or disinterest. It was an expression Jillian had seen in a lot of Soviet citizens; it was worn like armor by men and women who had discovered their intelligence could be perceived as dangerous to Stalin's totalitarian regime. It was an expression that assured NKVD men that they had no ambition and therefore posed no threat to the revolutionary government.

And Pavlov was smart, Jillian knew. She knew he was smart because he had successfully defended this ruined apartment building for almost two months against everything the Germans had thrown at them.

She stared into his dull eyes. "What is the strategic significance of Pavlov's House?" she asked, "my readers would like to know." She waited with her pen poised over her steno pad, ready to record his response.

"'Pavlov's House'?" He blinked at her, uncomprehending.

"That's what everyone calls it – this building – they call it Pavlov's House," Jillian clarified.

"But it's not my house," Pavlov replied, "I never lived here, before the battle."

"You've defended it, so that's what they call it. Even the Germans call it that."

"My men have defended it," Pavlov corrected.

"And they call it 'Pavlov's House' too." Jillian answered him.

Pavlov swallowed, uncomfortable. Jillian wondered if he was uncomfortable because he was modest, or if he was smart enough to know that celebrity could be dangerous. "The strategic importance..." she prompted him.

Pavlov shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. "The building is on the Volga. It prevents the Germans from gaining access to the riverbank, where they could shoot our re-supply ferries and barges. So long as this strongpoint remains in Russian hands, they cannot cut off our supply lines."

"But your supplies have been cut off," Jillian reminded him, "by winter."

Pavlov smiled at that. "No, not by winter," he corrected. "This is still autumn. And it's only temporary. When mother winter comes, she will freeze the Volga solid, and the supplies will resume."

"When do you expect that to happen?"

Pavlov shrugged. "Days, weeks, a month at the most."

"Can you hold out for a month? With no reinforcements?"

"We've never had reinforcements," Pavlov reminded with confidence.

Jillian scribbled the response in her quick shorthand. A response like that was pure gold, just what her newspaper readers wanted to hear: a small unit of men, with no reinforcements, stopping the German war machine cold. "Never was so much owed by so many to so few," she remembered Winston Churchill saying during the London blitz. He'd been talking about the British Spitfire fighter pilots who had defended England from German bombing, but he could so easily have been looking into the future and be talking about men like Pavlov, standing in the last line of Russian defense, defying the odds in Stalingrad. She scratched the thought down, so she would remember it when she wrote the article. "And how have you done it?" Jillian asked. "How have you succeeded where others have failed?"

"Look around," Pavlov said, spinning his hand over his head in a circle. "We are surrounded by open ground, a killing field. The Germans burned down the trees in the park, so now when they try to attack, they must cross open ground with nothing to hide behind."

"Have they attacked with artillery?"

"Of course," Pavlov said dismissively. "But we hide in our shelters and come out when the shelling stops."