Last Citadel

by David L. Robbins

  The boy’s reaction pleased Dimitri. He didn’t cower or mutter, nor did he erupt into shocked shame. He firmed, like something made harder by fire. He lifted his head and inflated his chest.

  ‘No,’ he said. Pasha considered his answer under the eyes of the others, his little clan, then repeated it. ‘No.’

  ‘There,’ said Dimitri, laughing into the rain. ‘I knew it! Pasha won’t get us killed at all! It’ll definitely be a German who does it. Right, boys?’

  At this Dimitri spread his arms and turned the two teenage soldiers back to the tank. He urged them to the General with a shove. The two boys climbed into their hatches and took their seats.

  Dimitri looked at his son, and saw the young man wondering what to do with his impudent father. Dimitri reflected back to his own father, how many times the old man had taken the flat of a sword to his buttocks, the flat of a palm to his cheek, how many lessons handed down with a blow or a barb. He’d hated the old man too many days, and loved him here, now, long after the man was gone, for those lessons. He did not want to be hated by his own son, but how else could he teach, what other way did he know?

  There is a straight line, Dimitri thought, from grandfather to son to grandson, like a saber skewering us all. Impatience, demands, love given too late. And now there is another war on; when would Dimitri have a chance to do it better than his father did?

  As though reading his mind - this was Valentin’s mother surfacing again in the boy, she could do that, answer questions Dimitri asked only in his head - Valentin said, ‘I’m trying.’

  Dimitri wanted to tell the boy the time was long past for trying. The biggest battle in history was going to start in a day or two, their tank company had orders to defend the Oboyan road with their lives, and it would be Valya’s trying, not Pasha or some lucky Nazi bastard, that got them killed. It was high time to quit trying and start doing. Valentin whined and sought forgiveness for getting it wrong. His anger and distance with his men was not leadership, it was just authority. None of the Communists seemed to understand this point. They preached that every man was equal, and so looked down on all men, explaining their mistakes that led to the deaths of millions as trying.

  ‘Thanks for the piss break,’ he said instead.

  * * * *

  July 3

  0905 hours

  Valentin left for a meeting with the other commanders in their company. Before he disappeared, he ordered the crew of the General Platov to remove every one of the shells from the bins and racks left after the early firing practice and lay them on the ground beside the tank. He told Dimitri his reason: he wanted to get rid of some of the heat rounds and add more solid-shot shells. If they were going to face Mark VI Tigers, there’d be little chance they could penetrate the mammoth tanks’ armor with the General’s 76 mm main gun. So he was going to target the Tigers’ treads and wheels for mobility kills. A still Tiger is a lot easier to surround and destroy. Plus, knocking out one Tiger takes out two, because it takes a Tiger to tow a Tiger off the battlefield. For that, the General needed more AP rounds. Heat rounds were best used against light armored targets, not tanks. And they were less accurate at ranges outside eight hundred meters, requiring more trajectory. This all made sense to Dimitri and he said he’d take care of it. Valya went off with another sergeant. Dimitri watched his son and the other man, both the same age and rank, walk away together, smoking and speaking as equals. He was glad Valya had men to talk with, since he clearly didn’t have much to say to his own crew. He wondered what his son was like as a friend and comrade. Probably quiet and earnest. Likely a follower. These would make him acceptable, perhaps popular.

  With Valentin gone, the gray morn had them sweat to do their work, a sauna under the camouflage netting. Pasha dug into the bins and passed the heavy rounds up through the commander’s hatch. Dimitri hoisted them out of the tank and handed them down to Sasha, who could barely handle the shells’ weight. Still, the boy laid them on the ground in a meticulous way, in rows of five, by ammunition type; he turned red as autumn in the process but never slacked. Dimitri’s muscles drank the exertion, and his worries were submerged in the dampness of the day.

  When all the shells were on the ground, the three men lay beside the rounds to gaze into the low scudding roof of cloud. Dimitri lit a cigarette, sensing the wet ground seep into his coveralls and not caring; being clean and dry was something he’d long ago said farewell to. Dimitri smoked, gazing up - the boys were resting -tapping his fingers on his thighs and wanting darkness, another quick dawn, and the following day to come, knowing that it, or the next, would bear the battle with it.

  He was fed up with waiting. There wasn’t much more the Soviets could do to fortify the Kursk salient. How many more artillery pieces and tanks and mines and barbed-wire bales can there be left in the world after what had been jammed into these five hundred square miles? How many more times could he flog his tank over the grasses and untended crops to fire at make-believe targets, how long until fate stopped flapping her wings over Kursk and descended to them, to sort them all out one by one? Crouching behind these thick layers of defense, letting the enemy choose the timing of the battle, was making Dimitri edgy. A Cossack was by nature a charger, and this was what the Red Army had become since Stalingrad, pounding the Germans backward, slapping them reeling, back toward Poland and out of Russia. Now, he thought, we wait for the Nazis to call the tune. He sat up and looked south, the enemy lines were thirty miles away. He cast his thoughts over the drab rim of the world, above the heads of the million defenders between him and the enemy, and called the Germans curses in his head: cowards, bastards, godless, anything to anger them and make them come now.

  Dimitri stretched out to kick Pasha and Sasha awake.

  ‘Do you know,’ he asked the boys when they were sitting up and bleary, ‘the difference in these shells? What each one does?’

  Both shook their heads, no. Dimitri thought as much; the training these new replacements had been given was - as Valya had said - shit.

  ‘The heat shells hold a warhead called a shaped charge. Inside the nose-cone here is an upside-down V of explosive.’ With his finger, Dimitri sketched the V on the shell, drawing the line, a mirror image of the point of the shell, so that a diamond was made starting at the tip of the shell. ‘When this hits, the charge ignites,’ and he drew his finger through the center of the diamond toward the tip, ‘and makes a jet of molten metal and superhot gases that will burn a hole through the armor. The crew inside is blinded in the first split second, then everything inside the tank is set on fire.’

  ‘Everything?’ asked Pasha, blinking, not comprehending what there was inside a tank to burn. There was nothing in there but metal and glass, and a little rubber padding.

  ‘Yes,’ Dimitri said. ‘Everything, including the air.’

  The two boys gaped, wide alert now.

  ‘Then the ammunition cooks off, and boom!’ Dimitri spread his hands, there was nothing between them but a fiery vision.

  Next, he nudged with his toe one of the AP armor-piercing rounds. These, he explained, were solid shot topped with a soft metal cap. When this shell struck, the cap splashed against the armor, giving the hard, sharp metal core a better surface to grip, lowering deflection and improving perforation. Once the arrow-shaped penetrator broke through the armor, it would blast a blizzard of shrapnel over the crew from its own break-up and the hole it drilled in the tank wall.

  Pasha and Sasha marveled, only dimly imagining what kind of death one met inside a tank.

  ‘It’s fast,’ Dimitri said, knowing it was that and much more but choosing only to describe the speed.

  Sasha asked, ‘Do the Germans have these?’

  Dimitri couldn’t contain his laugh.

  ‘Yes. Plenty of them. All pointed at us, my boys.’

  His other two tank crews had been boys like these, not much better trained, not much brighter, all awed by war and the responsibility they’d been given by Stalin and his mouthy co
mmissars to stop the Germans. The first crew had died in the Cauldron outside Stalingrad, while the Red forces were finishing off the last of the encircled German 6th Army. Some plucky, sneaky bastard jumped up on the tail of the first General Platov and jammed a magnetic mine under the rear overhang of the turret. When it blew, Valya had been standing in his commander’s hatch. He was rocketed straight into the sky like a Roman candle, his clothes shredded and on fire. Dimitri was just as lucky; the turret was lifted right off its ring and he found himself sitting in a convertible tank chassis, watching his smoking son drop out of the sky twenty feet in front of him. Half of the loader beside Valya was still in the turret. The gunner in the seat next to Dimitri had been smashed by the lifting turret. And three months ago, when the Germans retook Khar’kov, the second General had been immobilized after an anti-tank gun hit one of its treads. Dimitri knew whoever fired it had a bead on them, and they had to bail out in the time it took to reload that gun. He shouted, ‘Get out!’ and flung open his hatch. Dimitri heard the crack of the incoming shell while he dove shoulder to shoulder with his son into a crater. The other two boys were slower. The incomer was a HEAT round fired from a Mark IV no one had seen. The second General rocked, and the tank with its two scrambling boys left inside disappeared in blaze and smoke.

  Dimitri said none of this to Pasha and Sasha. The other four boys had their graves, they needn’t be buried fresh inside these two. Instead he handed them both cigarettes. A soldier ambled by carting a wooden crate of bottles, a daily ritual for the Red Army.

  Dimitri held out his hand and the soldier filled it with a clear bottle, a hundred liters of vodka stoppered with a cloth cork. Sasha reached for it but Dimitri held it back.

  ‘The commander gets the first swallow, Pasha. Always. We’ll wait.’

  Dimitri laid his back against the wheels of the T-34, making his cigarette glow. The clouds were not parting, the day would be dark. The three of them sucked on their cigarettes and Valentin walked up to the three red dots. Dimitri handed up the bottle. Valya tipped it well, then returned it to Dimitri.

  The crew of the General Platov ate a late morning meal, meat hash with black bread, and the vodka. Another ordnance truck came and swapped shells for Valentin, it was the commander’s option to carry into battle what ammo load he preferred. After the truck left, Valya unzipped his coveralls and bare-chested helped reload the bins and racks. Then Valentin ordered them back into the tank for more drills the remainder of the day.

  That night, Dimitri was the last of the crew to go to sleep. He sat on the closed hatch above his driver’s seat and watched the stars slip into the sky by degrees. Well into his second pack of smokes, he looked down the line of tanks and saw the breathing embers of other cigarettes, other sleepless men. He noted for the first time there was no traffic going on around him. Not a truck delivered soldiers and supplies, no tank rumbled off on night maneuvers. Nothing more was being done in the short dark hours away from the Germans’ surveilling eyes. The preparations to defend the Oboyan road were finished. He spit and the taste of tobacco was like gunpowder.

  In another hour, the southern horizon flared scarlet. The dark flowed back in, but another jittery dome was bitten out of the night. Dimitri watched and the flashes increased, a fever.

  From far off came the thumps, the gavel of war, the commencing.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 11

  July 3

  1240 hours

  Oktabrskaya train station

  The beat of pickaxes and sledges lulled Luis. His passenger car sweltered. His train had been stopped since last night at the ruined Oktabrskaya station. The brick station house had no roof left, just scored beams, and all its sills were marred with black brows of soot from the fire. The Red night bombers had done nice work. The garrison billeted at Oktabrskaya would be without quarters for a while. But more vexing, the rails were broken in several places. Luis and Major Grimm sat as they had all morning, staring out their dripping windows at a dreary drizzle, waiting for repairs to be effected.

  The major sweated profusely An hour ago he’d begged Luis’s pardon and stripped down to his white blouse. Luis watched him mop his head repeatedly. Porters ferried water to the major but there was no ice left on the train to cool it for him. Luis did not undo the first button of his SS uniform; his body had so little excess on it that he pitied the corpulent officer melting in the seat across from him. The two had spoken very little since the major came to sit down. Luis took long, languorous blinks, wishing to nap in the heat. But the major would not sit still and rustled the fabric of his seat every few minutes.

  ‘Perhaps a walk in the rain,’ Luis suggested.

  ‘No. I don’t want to climb back into that damn coat.’ The major held up his soaked hanky. ‘This is my first time in Russia. I thought it was supposed to be cold.’

  ‘I think, Major, Russia is only supposed to be inhospitable.’

  Major Grimm nodded and smiled, wiping sweat from his upper lip. The look on his face seemed an appreciation of the man who made this jest, one who’d bled a part of his life away into the Russian soil.

  ‘I think I will put you in for a medal.’ The major spoke under the dabbing kerchief. ‘You’re very clever, you know. Your preparations saved those tanks. And the way you handled those partisan scum.’ The major pretended a shudder.

  Luis had waited all morning for this statement from the officer. But Major Grimm had slept late, peeping out of his compartment only when the lunch trays were brought around. Luis contained his smile; this was the first step in the vision he held of his return to Russia and warfare. He would cover himself in medals and distinction on the Eastern Front, and go home to Barcelona as blinding to the eye as the sequins on his father’s golden traje de luces.

  ‘Thank you, Major.’

  The officer leaned forward to pat Luis’s knee, the puffed hand silly on his puny leg. ‘You deserve it, Captain.’

  Luis waited a moment while the major toweled himself. Then he stood, taking his leave to inspect the tanks, the men, and the progress of the repairs. He needed to do none of these. He simply knew it was a good moment to walk away. When the bull is down, walk the ring once, then stride away under the applause. Luis had gotten what he’d wanted from this officer. He’d made sure the man saw everything he did last night, held back the surprises of his tactics the way a matador hides the sword beneath the cape. Luis kept concealed until the right moment the tarp-covered machine-guns, his signals to the train’s engineer, his orders to the company of grenadiers. He could have sent someone else up the tracks to locate the explosive on the rails but he went himself. Knifing the last partisan was an inspired stroke. The major was enamored of Luis Ruiz de Vega, la Daga, the white Spanish blade.

  He stepped off the train into the sultry summer sprinkle. Luis drew himself up and let others notice him, the painfully thin SS man, unmindful of the rain, the one who’d put down the partisan; yes, they were talking. Moving only his eyes he caught someone point him out. Luis had been comfortable under the gaze of thousands in the plaza de toros, just the way he was accustomed to the feel of blood on his hands. Walking these tracks in damp Russia was nothing as far as performances went.

  Fifty meters in front of the locomotive, new rails were being laid by gangs of workers. The old, bent rails lay aside like giant tusks. The laborers were local Russians pressed into service by the occupation force, guarded by soldiers with machine pistols.

  Luis approached a sergeant.

  ‘Schneller!’ he said. Faster.

  The sergeant took a step forward and struck one of the workers with the butt of his gun. This worker - elderly like the rest of them, there was little but dregs left of Russian manhood in the towns, all the youth were gone to fighting - crumpled under the blow. Luis watched the man wobble to his feet without help, the other Russians along the rails kept their heads down. He did not see an appreciable increase in the rate of work, but the sergeant seemed satisfied and stood back. Luis did not wat
ch. He’d made his appearance and his point. Again he wondered at the German mind, the strange calculation that striking a human was the best way to make him obey. Perhaps this worked in Russia. It would not, he thought, work so well in Spain. The bull just gets angrier the more it is stabbed. When this war is over, he intended to be one of the men who saw to it the Germans took a more civil approach in his country.

  When he returned to his passenger car, the rain had not slacked. The major receded into his compartment and Luis was able to sit alone. He ate a bit of bread and cheese, always surprised by how quickly he felt full. More than half of what had been brought to him remained on the tray. He tossed the rest out the window and left the empty set of plates in front of him. When the porter came to clear them he gave Luis an approving wink. Luis closed his eyes and listened to the Russians work, the clink of hammers and spikes. The rain had washed away some of the day’s close heat. He slept, and did not awaken until the train lurched into the gray dim afternoon.

  * * * *

  July 3

  1845 hours

  Belgorod station

  At Belgorod, Luis’s mission dissolved around him. The rain stopped, too.