Last Citadel

by David L. Robbins

  2025 hours

  Heinkel in H-16 bomber

  altitude three thousand meters

  above L’ubotin

  A German bomber, flying west without escort. The Russian hunting pack must have licked its chops.

  The Heinkel bristled with gunnery. It bore twin turrets in the belly, one in the nose, and one up top. Every barrel raged at the streaking Soviet fighters. Breit pressed his face to the window. He couldn’t get a count of the Yaks, they banked so tightly and blasted back in, they seemed to be everywhere. He guessed there were three or four, no, five, then cursed his own need for numbers. The bomber’s engines wailed and his seat tilted steep, the bomber’s pilot rolled the plane hard to the north, back toward the Slatino airfield and closer to air cover. Breit’s breathing scraped in his throat, his lungs worked so hard they made his eyes and head hurt. He’d never been shot at before. The noise was deafening, there were machine-guns and cannons barking, roaring engines on all sides, baying around him like wolves at night. Breit didn’t know what to do - hold on, grab a gun, scream - he locked his eyes on the sky and the ripping contrails of the Soviet fighters’ wings.

  The bomber dove for the ground, trying to gain speed. Breit’s seat dipped and rolled. Vomit soured on his tongue. Over his head a sound like a freight train and a buzz saw all at once made him raise his eyes from the slanting floor to his window. The silvery cross of a Yak fighter leveled at him and came straight up the bomber’s wing. He watched the sparks of the fighter’s cannon wink at him, a wry death. The pass was over in a second but he had time for horror watching the fighter stamp holes in the bomber’s wing and blow up the starboard engine.

  The Heinkel rocked and dipped. The pilot corrected but the plane was sluggish. Smoke coursed out of the engine, the rightside prop locked up and stopped, looking very wrong this high in the sky. He smelled flame engulfing the ruined engine, he saw smoke streaming in through punctures in the fuselage. He noted that the turret above the cockpit had gone silent. The bomber’s other guns continued to rail, but the raw numbers and facts of Breit’s predicament asserted themselves through his shock and fear. It was inevitable that the bomber and everyone inside were going to be cut to pieces by these flashing Soviet planes.

  In that moment, he had his proof. One of the crew careened down the aisle to his seat, hauling two parachute packs. Panic warped the young man’s face. Blood spattered his cheeks and neck. The airman slung a chute into Breit’s lap. Breit had to pry his hands from the seat arms to catch it.

  The crewman shouted, ‘Put it on! We’re getting out! Now!’

  Breit hesitated. How do you do this? he wondered, too frightened to even open his mouth to ask. He’d never had any jump training, why would he?

  The crewman hauled the second knapsack over his own shoulders, jamming his arms through two straps. He reached down between his legs for two dangling belts, grabbed them, and clicked one each into the shoulder straps to form a harness.

  ‘Get up!’ the man yelled.

  Breit undid his seat belt. He stood, unsure if his legs would hold him on the listing floor. He slid the pack over his own shoulders and aped what the airman had done, clicking his arms and waist into the straps. A scarlet light blinked over his empty seat. The whole crew, those still alive, were bailing out.

  The crewman staggered to the door in the plane’s midsection. With a strong twirl of a fat handle, he yanked the portal open. He stepped to the threshold. Breit moved close behind him, crowding. He was stricken with fear, his movements were automatic. He had no idea what to do except whatever this crewman did. Wind whipped past in a deafening rush. The engine, seen now not through a window but dead ahead in the same windy, horrifying world as Breit, trailed a seam of smoke for kilometers behind them.

  The crewman laid both hands under Breit’s straps and with urgent tugs tightened everything on the parachute around Breit’s shoulders and hips. He pounded a fist, on a handle attached over Breit’s heart.

  He took Breit in both fists and jerked him closer, almost as though to begin a fight, and bellowed. ‘Pull this when you get clear of the plane!’

  With that, he spun Breit around and flung him out the door. The wind swept everything away - the plane, smoke, noise - and Breit tumbled head over heels.

  In the first second of the fall he lost the plane, then he lost the ground, somersaulting through the rasping air. He shut his eyes against the sting. With crazed hands he clawed for the ripcord handle, then remembered the crewman’s thump over his heart. He fumbled at a metal clasp and yanked on it hard, once, twice, nothing happened, no parachute sprang to his rescue, he was tugging on something that wasn’t the ripcord! Wind roared in his ears, blood surged in his temples from his spinning and hysteria. He slapped all over his chest for the ripcord. He found nothing but straps and buckles. He forced open his eyes and the whirling world dizzied him almost to blackness. Then he caught sight of the handle flapping on the left strap. He plunged his right hand for it, snared it, and pulled, accepting that this was his last chance.

  A pop and a flutter went off at his back. A solid grip snared him in the air, his shoulders and pelvis were wrenched. His legs flew out and almost out of joint, but now he was not wheeling over and over, he’d been yanked out of his fall. A white canopy unfurled overhead. Breit’s stomach had endured enough, he vomited into the open air, so hard all of it missed his uniform and boots. He watched the stream break into brown drops and fall. Breit was stricken by how close he was to the ground, the vast, twilit steppe.

  Falling slowly now, Breit hung limp, exhausted. He looked up for the parachutes of the rest of the crew, hoping to see five. Only one white bloom trailed after him.

  The He-16 smoked from both engines. Breit watched the Yak fighters ravening after it. He could count them easily now, there were four. He was still in the air with them, and their sounds hounding the dying bomber wracked his ears. Their guns chattered. Breit believed he could make out the sizzle of the rounds and the metal patter of their strikes. The smoking track of the bomber’s flight bent downward. The plane was riddled and killed. It whined, remorseful and beaten, then crashed into a proud fireball.

  Breit tore his gaze from the crewman floating far above him. The young airman was the most helpless creature Breit had ever seen. The Red fighters came at him in a line, firing in sport at the dangling German. Breit listened to the machine-guns and yowling engines. He saw the airman wriggle to make himself hard to hit -how funny that must have seemed to the Soviet pilots - then churn as the huge rounds slammed into him. Breit looked away.

  The fighters came around in a tight bank, propellers and tails almost grinding each other up. They came for him. Breit looked to the rising ground and pleaded with it to hurry. Break my legs, he thought, but hurry! He shot his eyes down to the earth, then back to the planes, measuring seconds and distance.

  The first fighter leveled out. The other three zoomed behind it. Breit braced for the sparks of their guns. He looked below his boots, ten more seconds until he was down. The fighters traced the steppe, blowing back the grasses with the wash of their passing. The lead plane took a blast at Breit. Zings whipped by him, terrifying and invisible. He did the same dance as the dead crewman still drifting above, wiggling in the air to make himself a harder target.

  Another burst from the first plane seared to his left, then the Yak roared by so close, his parachute swung in the roiled air. The second fighter closed fast and drew a bead. Breit nailed his eyes on the plane’s cowling, the muzzle for the cannon. The gun flashed.

  Breit’s body jerked. He screamed, sure he’d been hit. His ankles and knees buckled with unexpected force and he crumpled forward. He landed on his right shoulder, stopping his screaming. He was down. He pitched to his back, looking up into the rippling, folding chute. The remaining fighters tore past so low the parachute caught their wind and tried to haul him back into the sky. He struggled with the pack and scrambled away.

  Breit ran through a flat expanse of grass. The
Yaks rolled again in formation, were they coming back for him? His breathing filled his ears, he didn’t know how to escape, he was no combat soldier. He dove into the thin reeds and lay still, panting. After seconds he peeked above the heads of the stalks. The fighters had cut short their circle and flew off to the north. Breit saw only the descent of the dead airman, who returned to earth without a whisper. The sky was clear and tinting red, stained.

  * * * *

  July 9

  0005 hours

  somewhere west of Slatino

  Past nightfall, a pillar of smoke spiraled from the downed bomber three kilometers away. Breit watched the black column rise and bend to the breezes that cooled the steppe and tossed the heads of the grasses where he sat. Night closed in and he did not think once to head away from the smoldering wreck or move off from the markers of the dead man’s parachute and his own. He waited where he believed German rear troops would come to investigate the crash and look for survivors. He had no idea what else to do, he wasn’t sure how this part of war worked. He was in German-held territory, but he was still in Russia. So he stayed in place and sat quiet under the most stars and the farthest-flung sky he’d ever seen.

  Breit had been saved from the bomber by a miracle. The odds greatly favored his dying with the five crewmen, of Abram Breit becoming one of the fuels making that shaft of smoke still rising out there in the dark, or lying under his own silk chute, cut in half. Instead he was whole and alive and he had to get back to Berlin and to Lucy. Breit was not much of a believer in God, but he could not ignore evidence. Even if God had nothing to do with his narrow escape, Breit did believe in purpose. He’d been spared and that was enough to affirm his suspicion that he was on a great mission. The Soviets needed to know what he had to tell them, his facts and numbers, his insight about the Tiger tanks, the need to single them out everywhere they showed up. Abram Breit had been selected and protected for this very task. He didn’t ask by whom under the stars, but in his whole life he’d never been the one picked. He’d been on no adventures ever, until he became a spy. He’d not had that kind of youth, the campfire and skinned-knee boyhood of others, as a young man the sports teams and beering of men around him. Breit had studied, then taught, then as a soldier he’d catalogued stolen property. That was all changed now. Today’s exploit with the downed plane and the murdering Russian fighters and this black empty steppe was terrifying and had cost lives. This was war, and he was in it. Tonight he was special, a survivor. He carried the keys to history in his head. He felt alert and exhilarated.

  Twice in the late dusk he saw locals moving across the grassland before the nightfall curfew. One group led a mule back from the plow somewhere. The old men and women stopped and gawked at the German plane burning at the far end of the field in the last red glow of day. A half hour after that, Breit lay on his stomach, pressed to the ground, as two peasants came near to harvest the silk of the collapsed chutes. He worried that the two old men might see the track of crushed stalks where he’d run from his chute, ending where he now lay. They would find him and do what? He was a German officer. They wouldn’t dare touch him. The reprisals on their village would be fierce. He hid anyway, not certain. The men cut the white chutes from the cords and lapped them around their shoulders. They left the airman’s grisly body alone and continued across the field chattering over their good fortune.

  Breit waited for rescue. It was past midnight now. He listened intently, standing full in the darkness to cast his senses out in the field. Where was the German patrol investigating the crash? Isn’t that sort of thing done? he wondered. Of course it is. Perhaps with the battle going so hot, all the troops were committed to the north, pressing the attack. Yes, that’s it. Someone would come, certainly, but not tonight.

  Breit had to reach a German outpost. He needed another plane to Berlin, soon. Maybe the radio in the bomber was still intact. He could call for help. What else could he do? Sit here and wait the rest of the night, all day tomorrow, silent again when he should be heard? No. No more of that.

  Breit trod across the grass. Tassels brushed the backs of his swinging hands. Boots and trousers swished through the tall blades. His shoulder ached from the rough landing. Breit walked toward the bomber, imagining what cooked things he was going to have to see to get to the radio. He set his jaw against the images. He looked instead into the trillion stars spiked into the Russian night, parsed only by a small fire still flicking in the wreckage.

  He stepped into what felt like a hole, his boot did not find the ground. He collapsed toward it. In an exploding moment, the stars burst. They were fleeting and canceled by the ground striking his bad shoulder, then cuffing his face. Light flared in his eyes. Breit knew light though he could never paint it, and he knew this light was false, rupturing only inside him. Before he shut his eyes from the glare, he caught the ovals of boots, the cylinders of pants legs.

  The last to succumb was his skin. A dab of spit landed on Breit’s neck.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 16

  July 9

  0310 hours

  moving north with the 3rd Mechanized Brigade

  along the Oboyan road

  Dimitri could not even muster a spit. His mouth was a pit coated with diesel soot and dust. He rode on top of the General, clinging to a handle behind the turret, sitting on the deck above the hot engine. Sasha had asked to drive tonight for a portion of the retreat, to let Dimitri rest and get some air. The skinny boy, even with a chunk torn out of his biceps from a German bullet, had an adequate touch with the T-34, there was more strength in him than you could read by looking at him.

  The air had cooled since midnight. Dank sheets of mist filled the hollows and dips of the fields under a waxing moon. On all sides of the General, the remnants of 3rd Mechanized Corps beat across the steppe, fleeing north to find another place to defend the Oboyan road now that it had lost Syrtsev, Alekseyevka, and the Luchanino River. Dimitri was thirsty. Every crevice from his crotch to his eyelids was caked with a paste of sweat, dust, and exhaust fumes. Overhead the stars glittered and the night was calm, but Dimitri did not see the black curtain; instead he projected on it the fighting, the flames and blasts that had claimed sixty T-34s and their crews, two out of three in his battalion. Their hulks and bodies rested tonight on ground ceded back to the Germans. That was the worst taste on his tongue, the retreat.

  Valentin’s head bobbed in his hatch. Dimitri was disconnected from the intercom, and there was too much engine noise and squealing of treads all around for the two to speak. Just as well, thought Dimitri. With every round fired in the past two days, every order tapped on his shoulders or shouted in his headgear, he’d felt the distance magnifying between him and Valya as father and son, splitting them and changing them into what they had to become to survive, private and sergeant. He’d followed every one of Valya’s orders without debate. In the thick of the combat, he found himself responding to his son’s instincts, trusting him the way a horse conies to trust its rider. Left! Right! Speed! Stop! Go! Back, back! All without thought, just action. The upshot was they were still alive and had left a half dozen German tanks burning in trade for the land they’d yielded. But the payment inside Dimitri was that he did not want to clap a hand on his son’s shoulder tonight, to tell him he’d done well. He sat outside the tank and looked to the stars, seeing flashes that were not there, smelling fire that was not on the breeze. He lowered his gaze to the back of Valentin’s head, to a son who was no longer near.

  In the withdrawing convoy with them tonight were tanks, self-propelled artillery, tractors towing big field-pieces, armored personnel carriers, and trucks with riflemen crammed in the beds. The cacophony of a thousand wheels, treads, and engines sounded mighty, the ground shook under their collective power, but the direction was wrong, and the gray faces told the real tale. Every man was grimy and sotted with exhaustion, none of them more than Dimitri. He looked around at what the sliver of moon could show him through the roiling dust. He didn’t kno
w where the General was in any formation, there were no tanks in the front or rear of him that he recognized from his company. The retreat was just a hodgepodge of scurrying Red machines and men, beaten in one spot and hoping in the short night to find some rest and the resolve to not be driven away from the next place they would stand.

  Dimitri sat numb.

  He jolted awake, his eyes snapped open. The General had stopped in the night. Other machines by the dozens trundled by, continuing the retreat. The moon showed them rising across a broad sloping face; they’d come to the foot of a slow rise. The Oboyan road ran straight up its middle. This would be the next line of defense. On the steppe, any high ground was worth dying for.

  Pasha and Sasha clambered out of the General’s hatches. They stood on the dark ground which shuddered under so much passing steel, and stretched their backs. They looked around, not recognizing where they were and not caring, either; wherever they were was where they would fight, they knew this on just their fourth day of battle. These two boys were changed, too, in those four flaming days. Dimitri watched them splay on the raw ground beside the treads. In moments they were asleep.

  He kept his perch on the tank, watching columns stagger alongside the rising road. Mechanics came and added oil to the General’s motor. An armaments wagon stopped and off-loaded stacks of shells. A barrel of diesel was dumped into the fuel tank. None of this clatter awoke Pasha or Sasha. Valentin was gone into the gloom to meet with platoon leaders from whichever armored companies had made this backward trip with them. Dimitri slumped against the turret. His tank squad was all dead. His company had been decimated and dispersed. His crew had gone silent, his son was severed from him, his pilot daughter off somewhere facing who knew what, his army was in retreat.