Dimitri descended into the battle. It took its shape around him, like a current flowing past a prow. The immense noise and shuddering vibrations faded to a fizz in his ears. His feet on the pedals and his fists on the levers ruddered the tank through the flow of fires and howl. Pasha and Sasha faded, too, they moved like dipping oars, propelling the General into the waves of combat. Dimitri did not notice the ruin and din the way a sailor does not focus on the water, his eye is to the wind that drives him. Valya was that wind. The boy issued orders with voice and tapping feet, he lit up the morning with bonfires that were enemies, he started and halted the tank, rocked it with the cannon and recoil, every move was commanded by him. Valentin fought the battle, and Dimitri fought only the tank. There was peace in this, peace in the midst of horror. Dimitri left his hatch door open, to see as much of the field as he could. He exposed himself to exploding shrapnel, to a million zinging bullets, but there was nothing left to him in the world, he had no clan, he was no one’s hetman. The day was enormous, bigger and more tumultuous than anything he’d ever experienced.
The German tanks rolled over the advance trenches of the third and final defense belt etched across the Oboyan road. The Red soldiers of the 3051th Rifle Division held their ground against the charge of metal but by 1000 hours the tanks sliced through them and the German grenadiers followed, falling into the defense works, cauterizing them in close-quarters fighting. Dimitri saw the blasts of grenades, bodies flung on the black concussions; arms rose and fell with bayonets and trenching tools. German bravery poured itself over Russian bravery and together they boiled in the pits dug by Just Sonya and her thousand civilians. The unsheathed men of both armies mangled one another. The German tanks rumbled past their skirmish, spraying defenders with machine-gun fire and point-blank cannon until they had punched through the defense line. In a clanking, jagged line, buttoned tight and spewing shells and smoke, they treaded up the elevated ground that lay before Hill 260.8 and the Oboyan road and Dimitri.
The field that separated the T-34s from the German tanks was five kilometers deep and fifteen kilometers wide. The land was even and colored by smashed grasses, with no trees or streams to break the table. The slope up to Dimitri’s position was gentle and his view of the enemy tanks was unhindered, despite the battle haze, the fumes and spittle of fighting and dying machines. A medley of German tanks clattered forward. Dimitri spotted mostly boxy Mark IVs coming in wedge formations. A handful of feeble Mark IIIs bounced over the ruts like runt schoolkids desperate to keep up. He swept his gaze over the German advance, no fewer than fifty tanks spread before him. He wondered how many he did not see. The leviathans in their pack could not be hidden. Tigers.
‘AP!’ hollered Valya. Pasha slammed a shell into the breech. The General’s interior stank with sulphur backwash. A boot on Dimitri’s cap brought the tank to a halt. The turret whined to the right. Dimitri sat on the shuddering idle, downshifting to first, keeping the clutch depressed, his hands on the levers to leap ahead the instant the shell was gone. Valentin toed the firing pedal and the General shook. Without an order, Dimitri bolted ahead, going nowhere, but moving: A still tank on a battlefield is a fatal thing.
The roiled ground fountained in the cannon blast, Valentin did not ask Dimitri to wait until he could confirm a hit through the dust and grass, they just kept moving.
The Germans stayed back, they came no closer than a thousand meters. Some tank from either side would bolt ahead into the seven-, even six-hundred-meter range, not careful where his comrades were. He’d get off a shot or two and more often than not die right there, becoming a sort of fiery pylon demarking the ravaged boundaries between the forces. Valentin lost control of his tank squadron early, this was a free-for-all. He picked solitary targets across the distance of the field, using the small advantage of the elevation provided by the landscape, and was in turn picked by enemies. He shouted every order to Pasha, and only spoke to Dimitri when he had the turret rotated far enough to pull his feet from his father’s shoulders. Sasha fired at streaking Stukas when he could, but as yet there were no German infantry in range. The duels were impromptu across the field, gunner against gunner. This was tank battle in open land.
Dimitri ran wicked patterns across the field. He ducked in and out of the other T-34s, getting Valya the best flank shots he could while making himself hard to hit. He even went so far as to speed behind other idling Red tanks who were sitting still for moments to finalize their own targets, to scrape off the attention of any German commander who might be following the General in his periscope. Twice the General was struck, both glancing shots off the sloped armor that did not explode but struck like a bell clapper, dulling every ear inside for a minute. The crew stayed alive because Valentin was remarkably fast with his marksmanship, Pasha showed the determination of a machine, and Dimitri flogged the tank in and out of gears with the hands of a tillerman and a hard rider, lurching and careering, reversing just to be random and maddening.
He spun through a field increasingly clotted with burning T-34s. Twenty or more tanks smoldered in varying stages of destruction, some wrecked and dismembered, some aflame and whole, some silent and still. The toll of the battle was swinging away from him. Red soldiers trotted past, retreating north up the road and Hill 260.8, some without weapons, running from the beating they’d taken in their forward trenches. Two thousand black jots appeared around the arrays of German tanks, their panzergrenadiers advancing alongside their armor, the classic Blitzkrieg tactic, unbeatable.
The first tier of the final Soviet defense line before Oboyan had been breached. German tanks began to roll in front of their smoking dead comrades, the battlefield gobbled a hundred, two hundred meters more of the Oboyan road. Now the distance between the two tank armies was lessened. Valentin’s shots came faster, the enemy was larger in his sights. Dimitri rambled through a thinning Russian force, the Germans came up the long grade like a tide, sweeping into the trenches, bubbling over the sandcastle redoubts of Russia that would not hold them back.
Dimitri parked between two immobile T-34s, one raging on fire, the other mute and whole. Sasha and Pasha went out the hatches at Valentin’s command to scavenge ammunition from the quiet tank. Sasha slithered out his escape hatch below his feet with a red stouthearted face, eager to do something besides shoot at airplanes he could never hit. Valentin heaved empty shell casings out his open hatch. Dimitri eased his hands, hoping the shroud of greasy vapor from the burning tank would hide the General’s life from the closing Germans. He lowered his goggles over his eyes against the smoke wafting in his hatch, and breathed into his sleeve to filter the smoke. Pasha and Sasha ferried shells in to Valentin, who shoved them into the racks. The flames from the tank beside Dimitri murmured and lapped. He looked out his hatch at the Germans teeming around the Oboyan road. The ranks of the Mark IVs and Mark IIIs crept closer, they were within five hundred meters now. Infantry ran hunched behind and beside them. A company of sappers crept ahead, watching for mines, dangerous work. He stared into the gaps in the swirling pall and knew the Oboyan road was about to be lost. The German formations came like spears. Then, while he watched, the tips of the wedges seemed to open, the lead tanks pulled aside. Out from their shield, moving to the point of the advance, rolled six Tigers. All six of the giants fired at once. The boom pushed aside every other noise of the battle, six smoke rings stupefied Dimitri in the split second before the rounds landed.
The barrage struck other targets, the ruse of the smoke had worked. The .88s of the Tigers raised plumes in the dirt that sent Sasha and Pasha tumbling and squirming back into the General, hatch doors were screwed shut fast. Valentin’s voice cut through the scrambling in a bellow. ‘Go, go, go!’
Dimitri reacted by instinct, cutting loose the tank, shifting gears, pistoning his feet. But he did not pivot back up the hill to join the retreat. Instead, he wheeled the General at the Germans.
For a moment Valya gave no reaction. Dimitri gunned into second gear and did not veer.
Valentin’s boot tapped on Dimitri’s right shoulder. Turn, the boot asked. Dimitri did not yield, driving at the heart of an enemy wedge, into the smoking center where a Tiger towered. The boot nudged again, like a kind angel on his shoulder beseeching him to come around and flee, to live and bear these others in the tank with him away to live. Why? he asked, and in answer the center of the wedge four hundred meters away smoked again, a shell on a flat trajectory shrieked past and exploded somewhere behind. Sasha beside him leaned into his machine-gun and his vision block, firing and spinning the barrel at targets, they were close enough now to the German sappers for the boy to pitch in, and Dimitri thought, Good for you, Sasha. He was sorry to carry the two youngsters with him into the blackness he foresaw in his and his son’s futures, where there was no clan, where the Germans took the road today and Russia lost the battle for Kursk maybe tomorrow and finally the war, so there would be no more freedom. That would be a dead life, a conquered life. Sasha and Pasha won’t want that life, either. The battle mists sucked him forward, Dimitri shifted gears again. He didn’t decide this, to die today. But the leaflet had said ‘at all costs.’ What was he, Dimitri Berko, to not be spent on the Oboyan road? He knew he was nothing worth preserving.
The General bounded over the field past charring hulks, into a range where there were no other living Red tanks but his. He waited for his son’s boots on his shoulders, for his earphones to split with a screamed command to turn and join the retreat. But behind him Pasha rammed one more of the rescued rounds into the breech. Sasha sprayed the machine-gun, and Valentin acquired a target.
Alright, Dimitri thought. He was so tired, and this felt good, to be almost finished.
He reached up and lowered his armored hatch door, cutting down his vision of the battlefield to nothing but the rectangular slice glowing inside his vision block. He gave the T-34 over to Valentin this way, completely, and gave himself away, too.
Now the tank was enclosed around the four of them. The close green walls shook, the treads ground and squeaked, the diesel engine blared. Sasha exhausted one ammo belt and plucked another off the wall, slapping it into his breech. He laid on the trigger, brrrap, brrrap! Dimitri felt virtuous that he’d brought the red quiet child to this place where he was a man and hero. Pasha behind him, too, with a shell in his lap, sleeves rolled up, dirty and streaked, a warrior. Valentin’s boots on his shoulders were gentle, patting pressure left and right instead of pounding with insistence or panic or anger.
Both boot soles pressed beside Dimitri’s neck. At the signal he skidded to a halt. Sasha swayed at the failing momentum but kept firing his machine-gun, baring his teeth at what he watched himself do through his periscope. One of Valya’s feet left Dimitri’s shoulder for the firing pedal. There were plenty of targets, tanks everywhere three hundred meters away. Valentin wasted no time picking an enemy and letting fly. Within seconds the inside of the General was packed with the chattering machine-gun and the cannon, the reek of sulphur, the recoil and hot spitting of the spent casing, then the winding engine and Dimitri’s flailing arms weaving the General back and forth, wending snake-patterns into the path of the German advance. They were hectic moving toward their finish, all four doing their jobs, focused on their purposes, to finish well. How many shells did they have left? Dimitri wondered. They’d picked up an extra dozen, maybe they had twenty on board, five more machine-gun belts - it didn’t matter, there wasn’t enough, whatever the number. Dimitri drew the General closer to the advancing Germans.
He drove the tank into a crater, he hadn’t seen it coming. The chassis dipped. Dimitri’s head snapped forward. He downshifted to power out of the hole.
The intercom crackled.
‘Stay here.’
Dimitri halted the tank.
‘Back up.’
Dimitri reversed into the crater and eased the General’s hull below ground level. Only the turret was exposed now to the sights of the German armor.
‘HEAT,’ Valya called to Pasha. The boy laid aside the AP shell he’d cradled and dug up another. Valya lowered the long main gun. At this distance a high-explosive shell would penetrate a Mark IV’s frontal armor and turn it into an oven.
Dimitri saw nothing but the scorched dirt wall of the crater in front of him. Valentin goosed the turret left and fired. The scalding casing flopped on the rubber mat, hissing. Pasha fed the breech and swept the casing aside. Dimitri turned in his seat to watch his son. The boy’s face was smashed against his range finder, his hands played the traverse and elevation controls. The tank seemed to bend itself around him, gauges and handles, switches and eyepieces. He was a Communist, a drone, and this Soviet tank was made for him, for the peasants and the fighting believers. Dimitri had done his son a huge kindness bringing him here to the brink, where he could lay down his life for Lenin and Stalin, those purgatives of the human spirit. No one would forget Valentin Berko after today, the Cossack sergeant who charged straight into the German maw while the rest of the Red force withdrew up the hill. Pasha and Sasha, they didn’t know they were going to die. They would be forgotten.
The cannon fired again. The General shied from the crater wall, then settled again.
Dimitri looked at Sasha. The boy had no one to shoot at, Dimitri nowhere to drive.
‘You know, it’s a beautiful morning out there.’
The boy blinked, confused. He’d been ejected from the battle with his finger still on the trigger, he licked his lips for more blood to spill.
Dimitri reached for the lever to his hatch cover and gave it a twist.
‘Let’s go have a look.’
He shoved open the hatch and stood. The blue sky was immense and patient. With sore hands Dimitri boosted himself onto the glacis plate, then walked along the General’s fender to squat on his haunches behind the turret. Sasha appeared at the rear of the idling tank. Dimitri lent a hand to lift him onto the engine deck, and together they peered at the battleground.
Valentin and Pasha fired. The long cannon swiveled, paused, and fired again. The tank jumped with the reports, but no more than a horse over a hedge and Dimitri sat on his heels, balanced, while Sasha held on. The turret rested for long moments, listless smoke trailed out of the big gun. Then the fat round turret whirred and rotated far to the right, away from the dozen or so enemy tanks and thousand grenadiers bearing straight down on the General’s crater. This close to the leading edge of the German advance, Valentin chose for his last precious rounds to target a Tiger four hundred meters to the left. The giant was at the head of a wedge, broadside. It rumbled slowly across the field, inexorable and unwitting, vulnerable.
Dimitri waited beside Sasha for Valya and Pasha to strike. The seconds of the morning had no ticking clock to pace them; instead there was the whine and rolling creak of steel, the thrum of cannon blasts from the broad German advance in front, and from behind on the Russian-held hill and the Oboyan road. Above, planes slashed in crisscross duels with fantastic, straining motors. Sasha and Dimitri were the only still and silent things of the battlefield, except the dead. The boy’s eyes darted, nervous and aroused. He knew now.
Valentin took his time targeting the Tiger. The monster was moving and Valya had to give the proper lead. Dimitri slid across the T-34’s deck to sit beside Sasha. He wrapped his arm about the boy’s shoulders. Sasha trembled as if he were cold. Dimitri kissed the boy on a fuzzy cheek. He turned his head to the Tiger. Sasha’s thin arm nestled around Dimitri’s waist, and his head turned, too.
The General’s gun crept to the right, stopped, and fired. The roar was splendid. A corona of blasted air and dust swept up from the steppe, then returned to it tumbling. The Tiger smoked. Valya scored a direct hit on the massive tread. The Tiger jerked as though tripped and did not move. Behind it, the wedge of armor slowed and halted, unsure. Valentin fired again, splurging his waning ammunition on the Tiger, to make certain the thing was killed. The big tank disappeared in a ragged globe of fire.
The German wedge was motionless. Valentin an
d Pasha went into a frenzy. The General’s cannon erupted six times in under two minutes, each shell pummeling the weaker side armor of the several Mark IVs accompanying the ignited Tiger. Dimitri and Sasha thrilled and gripped each other with each report. Sasha began to cheer. Valya had torn a hole in the German assault. Dimitri looked across the battlefield and was surprised to see the entire German advance paused to consider this little, lone T-34 dug into a crater smacking them on the nose. Dimitri thought, Keep it up, Valya! Hammer them good!
But the cannon did not fire again. The turret did not pivot for another target. The ammunition was gone.
The air keened in Dimitri’s ears. In the fraction of a second left to him, he cut his gaze straight ahead, to a Tiger 250 meters away. He stared straight down the muzzle of the gigantic, smoking barrel.
The lip of the crater erupted. He was blown off the tank, Sasha was ripped from his arm. He landed beside the General’s port tread; dirt showered on him. His head pounded and his goggles were gone. All the buttons on his coveralls were missing, the pockets and chest flapped open. He staggered to his knees.
He scrabbled on all fours around the links of the General’s tracks. Haze wafted off the glacis plate. The .88 shell had pierced the crater berm and struck the frontal armor of the T-34. Dimitri had no way to know if the plating had held, if Valentin and Pasha were dead.
Last Citadel Page 34
