Last Citadel


David L. Robbins




* * * *


A SIGNAL TO THE WORLD


I have decided to conduct Citadel, the first offensive of the year, as soon as the weather permits.


This attack is of the utmost importance. It must be carried out quickly and shatteringly. It must give us the initiative for the spring and summer of this year. Therefore all preparations are to be carried through with the greatest care and energy. The best formations, the best armies, the best leaders, great stocks of ammunition are to be placed at the decisive points.

Every officer and every man must be impressed with the decisive significance of this offensive. The victory of Kursk must be a signal to the world.


Adolf Hitler

Operations Order (No. 6)

April 15, 1943


* * * *


CHAPTER 1

May 10, 1943

1440 hours

Reichs Chancellory

Berlin, Germany


The SS colonel eased shut the high, heavy door. The portal closed with a hiss and a soft tap. How many trees went into this, he wondered, lives sacrificed out of the forest to make one of Hitler’s castle gates? The black eagle emblem of wartime hung at eye level against the carved wood.

Colonel Abram Breit imagined this symbol of the Reich to be a spread-winged vulture. That’s what he left behind in the briefing room - a death scene, a picking apart, sinew by vessel, of Germany.


Breit walked several steps into the hall, striding across the same black eagle laid in mosaic in the floor. Blood-red banners trickled down the walls. He buttressed his back against one of them and lit a cigarette.


He exhaled smoke and stared into it, tired and sad. He replayed the voices of the briefing room, Hitler with his generals and advisers. Citadel - the looming, titanic battle for Kursk on the Eastern Front - consumed the hours. Since morning Breit had watched the little wars between the generals, battling over Hitler as if the Führer were a spot of high ground; candor fell in combat with flattery, reason was mauled by pride. Around and above the grand table, more banners festooned the room, great ebony swastikas circled like the buzzards of Breit’s imagination. Everywhere Hitler’s minions had hung the images of Hitler’s belief, to let no eye wander to another way of thinking, to any other allegiance, certainly to no thoughts of Germany’s welfare, only the Nazis’.


Breit ground the last of the cigarette into the sole of his boot. He pocketed the white shred and lit another. In the smoke he recalled Hitler’s eyes, wavering. In the past month, Hitler had become obsessed with reading about Verdun, the meat-grinder battle of World War I France. Hitler had been a corporal on the Western Front. As a runner he was wounded and gassed. Breit saw in Hitler’s eyes the memory of the trenches, and the parallels to be drawn between the butchery of Verdun and what awaited Aryan manhood in the trenches of the Kursk bulge.


This was Germany’s third summer of campaigning in Russia. The Reds had yet to swoon the way these generals had promised Hitler before the invasion in ‘41. Now the army lacked the resources for another major offensive in the East. Instead, their available forces were to concentrate on one smashing blow against the Kursk salient, a segment of the front line that ballooned westward into the German mid-section.


The plan called for two immense forces to blast across the Russian defenses - Field Marshal von Kluge from the north, Field Marshal von Manstein out of the south - and converge in the center at the city of Kursk, pinching off the Soviet bulge. The operation was designed to surround massive Soviet formations and, more important, shorten German lines to free up men and machines desperately needed elsewhere. The Americans were sure to come to Italy this summer, and Il Duce, Mussolini, was ill-prepared to go it alone.


Hitler was going to commit every available soldier, gun, tank, and airplane to the action. This would be the largest buildup of German armed power of the war. If Citadel succeeded, it would be a loss of blood that Hitler could scarcely afford. If Citadel failed, the ruin of men and materiel would be even greater; worse still, Germany would be exposed to a Russian counterstrike. That could be fatal, the beginning of the end. Citadel would be the last German offensive of the war in the East.


The stakes for Hitler were higher today than at any time in the war. He was being asked to gamble, to throw the dice once on Citadel with everything riding on the table. There would be no second go-round, no backup plan. This was do or die.


The chief problem was that Citadel was obvious. A quick glance at the map of the Eastern Front lines presented the most elementary scenario to any war college student. The Kursk bulge was clearly the best place for an attack, a pincer action was the plain solution. Germany knew this. Russia knew this. The coming fight was going to be without surprise; once begun, it would be brute strength against strength, two behemoths pressing chests.


The Führer fretted aloud in the briefing room. He stabbed his finger at the maps spread across his conference table, aerial photos of Soviet defenses in the Kursk region. Even from three miles in the air, the groundworks dug by the Russians looked incredible; the amount of armaments and men flowing into them was monumental. And these defense works would be arrayed directly in the path of the planned German offensive. How could this be, Hitler wanted to know.


The buzzards flew from their perches then.


Field Marshal von Kluge spoke first, flapping to the table and sweeping a hand in the air over the foreboding maps. We will crush these pitiful defenses, the Field Marshal vowed, speaking in bald propagandistic phrases, the kind Hitler loved to hear. German ground forces have always penetrated enemy defenses and will do so in this case. Besides, look at the technological advantages we have, mein Führer. Look at our new tanks.

Our Panthers and Tigers. Our tanks will make the difference, without fail.


Colonel Abram Breit had been brought to Berlin and was in the room to speak to this question of what impact the superior German armor would have on Citadel. Breit was the intelligence officer for the 1st SS

Panzergrenadier Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. His division was to be in the vanguard of the Citadel assault. Leibstandarte would enter the fight with thirteen of the new Tiger tanks. It was his job to predict how the battle would go. After von Kluge spoke, Hitler glanced at Breit.


Field Marshal von Manstein, the man whose proposals gave birth to Citadel, replaced von Kluge at the map table. Hitler smiled over at Breit.

This was when Breit saw deeply into Hitler’s eyes, when Hitler with a look apologized for skipping over Breit. They were the eyes, he realized, of an ill man. Hitler’s physician had been treating him for constipation, prescribing ever more powerful laxatives. Hitler’s eyes were lusterless, their striking blue was clouded. The Field Marshal began his comments. He said we may have waited too long. The Reds are getting ready for us. We should have attacked them in April, just after the spring thaw, the Russian rasputitsa.

Breit watched Hitler agree, the dull eyes growing duller in disappointment and pain. Hitler did not know what to do. He slumped beside the great table where Germany lay and watched his visions of conquest and empire be pecked at by his commanders, who could not agree. His puffy face nodded; his chin sagged to his chest.


Field Marshal Keitel spoke next. We have to attack in Russia this summer, he said. For military as well as political purposes. Our allies demand that Germany not be passive in the East. The Italians need to see our resolve, as do the Finns and the Turks. Japan is concerned that we have not made sufficient progress against Russia. The German people require this, as well. The bombings and the failure at Stalingrad have taken their toll on morale. We must fight and win, Germany must retake the momentum. Our troops insist on a victory. Hitler listened and nodded, swayed again by whatever voice held the floor.


Breit backed quietly out of the room while Keitel talked. He came out here alone into the bannered hall and smoked.


The great door to the conference room slid open. Another black uniform with silver gleams and black leather strapping, the garb of the SS, slipped out. From the pack in his hand, Breit shook out the nub of another cigarette and held it up.


‘Captain Thoma.’


The young SS officer accepted the cigarette and a light. He sucked the first drag down like a man without fear of ever dying, smiling and posing in the soft light, his blond head tilted back.


‘What do you think, Colonel?’ Thoma asked. The captain had been invited to the conference to speak to the training progress of the SS

tankers in their new Tiger Mark VIs. Thoma, too, had been ignored by the generals during the meeting, left to stand aside as some kind of statuary, an example for Hitler of how attractive Germany’s soldiers were.


He spoke now with the smoke coming out of his nostrils like a young dragon.


Breit said, ‘I think, Captain, they don’t care a fig about what you and I have to say.’


‘I suspect they should listen. You and I know more than all of them put together.’


‘Do we?’


‘Did you hear what Guderian asked? “Why should we attack in the East at all this year?” Of course we should attack.’


Yes, Abram Breit thought, I heard Guderian, the general in charge of rebuilding Germany’s armored forces. And I heard Hitler’s reply: ‘Whenever I think of the attack my stomach turns over.’


‘Tell me, then, Captain, why you believe we should attack Russia this summer. Even if we grind through those growing Russian defenses, will we be able to hold our gains? The Reds outman us two to one, they outgun us two to one. And after we surround the Soviets, can we keep the pocket sealed? Will we be able to clear the pocket with the forces we’ll have left after fighting our way to Kursk north and south? In view of all this, tell me why Guderian is wrong, Captain.’


Thoma tossed his cigarette to the polished floor and ground it out, careless and again very young. ‘We have the tanks, Colonel. The Tigers.

I’ve been training with them for the last five months. My men and I are more than ready. The Tiger can beat any tank it meets on any battlefield. Sir.’


‘But out of twenty-three hundred tanks, you’ve got only a hundred Tigers for the battle. The Soviets have over three thousand T-34s.’


‘One Tiger is worth a hundred Red tanks.’


‘Is this what you would have told the Führer if he’d asked?’


‘Yes. Absolutely’


Thoma had almost come to attention with his remarks. It seemed he was defending a maligned friend. Breit took in the tank commander’s hard posture and erect Aryan beauty. How many, Breit thought, how many of these young men will be flung into the flames to forge Hitler’s dreams?


‘What about the new Panther tanks?’


Thoma grinned a little at this. Both men knew about the difficulties the Mark V had been having in development. The Panthers had not yet proven themselves reliable, yet Hitler’s generals had insisted that Citadel be postponed for months in order that two hundred of the Panthers be built and shipped to Russia for the offensive. Thoma reveled a bit in the Panthers’ failures, none of which had cropped up in his Tigers.


‘They’ll do their best, Colonel. But the Tiger will be the tank history remembers when Citadel is done.’


‘The Americans are going to land on the Continent, Captain Thoma.

We don’t know when but it will be in Italy and it will be this summer. That would be a very bad thing if we don’t have enough forces there to hold them off.’


Breit rattled out one more cigarette for himself. He would go back into the briefing after finishing it. He’d heard all he needed in the room, but did not want anyone to note his absence for too long. Breit did not want to be noticed at all.


He offered another cigarette to Thoma. The Captain shook his head.


‘There will be a Citadel, Colonel. There has to be.’


‘Why, Captain?’


‘Because this is our time.’


‘Yes, Captain. I quite agree. I think we should slip back into the room separately. It’ll be quieter that way. You first, please.’


Thoma clicked his heels unnecessarily, there had been nothing formal about their chat out here in the hall. The sound was hard, the way Thoma made himself at Breit’s doubting of the coming battle. Thoma is right, Breit thought, watching the young officer pull open the huge door and disappear behind it. There will be a Citadel. Yes, there must be. Because it is indeed Germany’s time.


Time for Germany’s doom.


* * * *


May 11

1210 hours

Old National Gallery

Berlin


The Impressionists room was often crowded at lunchtime. The more beautiful the weather, the more Berliners strolled for their midday break.

The Americans and the British did not bomb on perfect spring afternoons.

The Yanks did their work only in the mornings, and the Brits raided at night.

So far, they’d mainly contented themselves with wrecking the areas in north Berlin, the manufacturing districts. Downtown remained the nerve center for running the Nazi state, for parks and museums, and the myth of German survival.


Abram Breit carried his sack lunch, a sandwich and a French apple, here to the Old National Gallery beside the Spree River. He spotted an opening on a bench across from a Monet, a blue and violet study of the Palazzo da Mala in Venice. Monet had been so smitten with the dazzling light of Venice on his first trip there that he stayed for four months, painting the ancient facades and canal waters. Breit walked in front of the painting on flat soles, careful not to clout his polished boots against the wood floor.


He snuggled in on the bench. The buttocks of a heavy-set woman rested against his hip, she stared at a Cezanne on another wall, a sketch pad in her lap. Breit dug his sandwich out of the paper bag and unwrapped it, making a game of how quietly he could handle the wax paper. He chewed and looked at the Monet. Breit had always wanted to view the world the way a painter did, to see behind form and color to the world’s vibrations, to gaze not just at an object but at light itself. Abram Breit had tried as a child to make paintings, drawings, anything with a brush or pen, and failed; he lacked the gift of the painter, the sight. So he chose instead to exercise his love of art by becoming a student of it, then a teacher. When the war began, he was a thirty-eight-year-old professor of art history at Heidelberg University facing the reality of military service. He approached the SS, which quickly accepted him into its intelligence corps. Breit was an educated man, with the manners and bearing of the upper class. He was an exemplar of that legend of superiority the SS liked to concoct, especially in Leibstandarte, the first of the SS divisions, grown out of Hitler’s personal bodyguards.


Breit began his work for the Reich by valuating art taken from dispossessed Jews. He made no judgments on where the art came from; few in Germany did that sort of thing once the deportations started. The plight of the Jews was not his concern. Breit busied himself arranging collections and shows, selecting which pieces would be put on public display and which would hang in the private galleries of Goebbels, Speer, Himmler, Goring, Hitler. For this service, the Führer had awarded him the War Merit Cross with swords that hung on the left breast of his tunic. Breit had chosen this Monet for this museum.


He finished his sandwich and began his apple. He was wary not to crunch through the skin and pulp. Breit made no noise.


He never did, and he knew this. As a child, he’d abandoned his wish to be an artist, letting it loose without a pin drop in his heart. As a student, he’d kept his nose in books while Germany rebuilt itself from the debacles of World War I. Again, as a young professor, he stuck to his classrooms and towers at Heidelberg, avoiding the street clashes between the roving brown shirts of the National Socialists and the red sashes of the Communists. When the war started, Abram Breit took up his duty in the dungeons of Jew basements, in echoing great galleries, peering through magnifying glasses at canvases and into tomes of art history. A few years and five million men marched past him, history fell out of the sky, horror rolled past in trucks and tram cars, Germany tore itself to pieces across the globe, and Breit stood silent.


No more.


He chewed the apple thoughtfully, mulling the pulp on his tongue. He stood and walked around the bench to face the other direction, away from the vivid Monet. Sitting, he set his eyes to the Picasso and the Braque he’d chosen for display in this room.


The war had cost Breit his love of the Impressionists. Those painters had become bourgeois, coveted by the well-to-do, sold for large sums, even during their lifetimes. Their groundbreaking work - softening the image, the destruction of age-old realism - had fallen headlong into the mainstream. Monet, Manet, Renoir, Seurat - these weren’t the names of painters any longer so much as they were investments, portfolios for the Jews and others to hedge their bets during the war, hide their money in something other than currency no different than gems or gold bars. Breit cared only for one Impressionist now, the crazy Dutchman van Gogh, who never while alive sold one painting. Van Gogh, of all the Impressionist masters, was untouched, left alone with that madness that had become his vision. Breit preferred the Cubists, the artists who had moved away from the emotion and decorative symbolism of Impressionism. The Cubists -

Picasso and Braque among them, who were put on their path first by the prophetic work of Cezanne - reconstructed the form on the canvas out of its base geometric elements, the spheres, cones, cylinders, and boxes of every object. These were egalitarian ideals, to break man’s world into simple patterns, into every man’s vision, mad or genius or gifted or not, even Abram Breit’s.


The Impressionists looked at their world and made it pretty, captured like butterflies pinned to a mat. But not Picasso. Not Braque. Not like the abstract Russian Kandinsky. These men shattered the world in their hands and gave it back made only of building blocks, with room for the individual and imagination; they invited the viewer onto the canvas and asked him to build a new world out of these raw parts. Abram Breit had fallen in love with the Cubists.


He remained a silent man. There was nothing he could do about his nature. But he could do with his life what the Cubists had done with the image, break his nature into its basic elements and take a clean look. So Breit did this, slowly, with the small brush strokes he never could muster with his hands, but could with his mind. In the mirror, in his tailored SS

uniform, he began to see what he was made of. He shuddered to find so much reluctance and cowardice. Abram Breit faced the fact that he’d turned into a man he’d never wanted to become; he was not an artist, not a teacher anymore, not an individual at all. He wore SS black, the absence of all color.

Abram Breit had become so silent a man that he was gone. His cowardice had erased him.


Breit was aroused for more truth. Yes, he’d been a coward. And what had been the canvas for his cowardice? He looked outside his window, into battered Berlin, across Europe, to the Balkans, into Russia. There he saw Germany’s fear and vanity. Undisguised, plain as paint and framed in flame, Breit grasped Hitler’s madness and genius - genius is madness, in a way -

the driving forces behind the war, a global conflict made by Breit’s country and people; but Hitler’s madness was not like van Gogh’s. The Führer had grown openly corrupted by power, by the saluting hordes and goose-stepping world risen around him. Hitler had men on all sides who were devious for their own gains. Germany was in the wrong hands. That, like a sphere, a cone, a circle, a square, was an elemental truth. No man was so silent he could turn away from this.


First, Breit requested a transfer from the art archives to military intelligence. Most of his cataloging work was concluded; the flow of confiscated art had slowed as Germany became judenfrei. Leibstandarte granted his request. In late 1942, Breit trained for three months in Munich.

Then he was assigned back to Berlin, as divisional liaison to Hitler’s staff.

The Führer himself made the request, delighted with the artwork Colonel Abram Breit had selected for his chalets and castles.


Abram Breit became a spy.


This was not so hard to do. There were many ears in Germany listening for betrayal, some to punish the betrayers, some to welcome and encourage. Breit let slip a comment or two here and there, words that he could have easily explained away as too much schnapps or a simple misunderstanding. He traveled to East Prussia, around Germany, to conquered France, a loyal and efficient junior member of the general staff.

It was in Switzerland he was approached.


All he knew was that he would be working for something called the Lucy network. These were German patriots, he was told, like him, men and women who were the real guardians of Germany’s precious future. They would do everything they could to stop the Nazi war machine. Whatever secrets Breit could funnel into Lucy would be channeled to Hitler’s most powerful enemy, Soviet Russia.


Breit was unfazed at the destination for his treasons. What he wanted most was what the Cubists demanded: a change, a new world, a new Germany, a renewed Breit. The Russians could give him all that.


He finished the apple. He slipped the core into the paper sack, making less rustle than the woman still sketching the blue Monet. Breit set the bag on the bench beside him. He cupped his chin in his hand and rested his eyes on the Picasso. The painting was one of the artist’s early Cubist treatments, Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table. In this work, Picasso had brushed away all depth perception. The table and its bowl and loaves all seemed to be on a single plane; the backdrop of a curtain and a wall came forward, impinging on the objects they ought to exist behind and apart from. There is no difference, Picasso painted, between the object and its surroundings. Everything is one. Everything is connected. Art can change minds. And because it can, it must.


Breit stood. He left the paper sack on the bench, it was trash. He stepped toward the door to leave the museum.


A blue-suited security guard, an older gentleman with a handlebar moustache, swept in behind him. The guard gave Breit a tut-tut for leaving the rubbish of his lunch on the bench. The elder man scooped up the paper sack and took it away. Breit nodded his head in silent apology. The man inclined his own head and disappeared.


Breit walked out of the museum with a hundred others, lunchtime was done. He ambled along the banks of the Spree to the Monbijou Bridge. He crossed halfway over the river. Cars trundled behind him, Berliners strolled past returning to their work administering the Nazi regime. The river glistened under the sun. Breit tried to view the light on the green ripples the way Monet had seen the canals of Venice, and could not. All he caught was glare and motion, people on his left and right ignoring him and the river.

This was unfair, Breit thought, to be excluded like this, to be as blind as everyone else.


But I am not blind, Breit thought. And I am not mute.


At that moment the old museum guard would have in his hands two folded sheets of paper pulled from the crumpled bag Breit left on the bench. The Old National Gallery was one of a half-dozen drop sites around Berlin the Lucy network had arranged for him. The two pages were filled front and back with coded script. They would reach Moscow tomorrow, after being routed through Lucerne, the base for Lucy. The coded sheets gave an exacting report on Hitler’s meeting yesterday with his generals, every detail Breit could recall about the coming battle for Kursk. Breit related the Führers desperation, the indecision of his generals, the immensity of the forces to be committed to Citadel, the fantastically high political stakes for Germany, the last throw of the dice. He described the deterioration of Hitler’s physical condition, Hitler’s obsessive fretting over an approaching American invasion of Italy and Mussolini’s chronic weakness, even the training and morale of young Captain Thoma’s Tiger tank crews, the number of tanks to be involved, the mechanical problems popping up with the Panthers, everything Breit could gush to the Russians to help them beat the Nazis out of Germany like dust out of a rug.


Abram Breit was a spy. He remained a quiet stroller through the war, but he was not a mote or a minion, not like these speechless souls shuffling across the river. Breit was a changed man whom Hitler would personally hang on a meat hook if even a whisper surfaced of who he was, and how much influence Abram Breit was finally having with what he could see, hear, and tell.


* * * *


CHAPTER 2

June 28

1430 hours

Vladimiriovka, USSR


Dimitri Konstantinovich Berko laughed and could not hear himself. He bumped his head hard but his padded helmet softened the jolt. He straightened his goggles over his eyes and licked dusty sweat. The metal around him humped and bucked and because it was Dimitri making all this happen he laughed more and whooped.


He rammed his left boot down on the clutch and in the same instant mashed the brake with his right. The tank ground to a halt. Dimitri hauled the gearshift into reverse; the gears of the new tank fought him for only a grinding second, confused by the speed of his hands and feet, then meshed. He stepped on the gas and popped his foot off the clutch. The tank around him jumped and slammed down, the tracks spun fast and bit farther into the dirt. Dimitri hit the brake and clutch again, shifting to neutral.


Whorls of dust, the black spume of the steppe, spilled into the open driver’s hatch, riding on the June sun. He let the tank idle, hoping to hear screams from the men beneath it; the engine growled out any sound but its own. This is the way of the tank, Dimitri thought. You hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing, but the tank. You have to imagine the rest.


Oh well, he thought, I’ll keep having fun even without the screams.

Looking out through the hatch, he saw the whole company had gathered to watch his antics, the way Dimitri could make a tank shudder and dance, spin, and even run in place to dig its way down into a trench. They should see me on a horse, Dimitri thought. Next to an old Cossack on a horse, this tank, this machine, is nothing.


He shifted into gear, hit the gas, and let the clutch fly again. The tank bolted, its treads scoured the ground, Dimitri nodded; this T-34 fresh from the factory had some fire in its belly. He felt the chassis drop again toward the men in the narrow trench while dust thickened the air inside the tank. He pulled his hands off the twin steering rods. Rearing his goggled head out of the hatch, he raised both arms in the air and shook his fists for the crowd. I am the best driver! I am the Cossack of the tanks! He did not hear the men’s shouts but saw them raise their arms in reply, Yes, you are!


While he waved his fists in the air, several men broke ranks from the crowd and ran toward the tank. They dove through the dust cloud into the trench. Dimitri leaned over to see just how far he’d scraped down to the 6th Guards infantry trainees who’d hunkered under his bouncing T-34. Good, he thought. Almost all the way down to the undercarriage. That must have put some shit in a few britches under there, watching the bottom of a thirty-ton tank bore its way down on you. That was the point, wasn’t it? This was an exercise to help these peasant boys get rid of their fear of tanks. A job well done, then, Dimitri told himself.


He lowered himself through the hatch back into his driver’s seat. He gunned the engine and pulled the T-34 out of the trench. The diesel engine spit black fumes onto the trainees in the trench and doused those do-gooders helping their quaking comrades. Dimitri yanked back on the left steering lever and shoved on the right, spinning the tank in a tight circle, gouging out one last billow of dust. He shut the tank down.


He climbed onto the glacis plate and slid to the ground. Six soldiers staggered out of the trench, three helping another three whose legs wobbled. Those who could muster angry stares shot them at Dimitri, but like the tank his armor was sufficient to repel them. With his soft helmet and goggles pulled from his head, he could now hear the cheers. Dimitri ran a hand through his gray, close-cropped hair. He waved, then bowed.


When he straightened, he saw a sergeant stomping furiously over to him.


‘Private. What do you think you were doing?’


The commander of Dimitri’s tank was neat and good-looking, wearing the Russian tankers’ slate-gray coveralls like Dimitri, except his weren’t so sweaty and smirched. He was built like Dimitri, a bit long for a tanker, not so squat and thick to fit inside these cans of war. He was no peasant.


‘What I was ordered to do, Comrade Sergeant.’


Dimitri was calm. The man was much younger than him. All of the men were.


The crowd went quiet.


The sergeant worked his jaw, careful with Dimitri but resolute to show displeasure.


Dimitri spoke first.


‘A lot of these men have never been in combat. You and I have, Sergeant. What did you want me to do, be nice to them?’


The sergeant’s eyes cut away. Dimitri followed where he looked. A colonel stood in the crowd of men, hands on his hips, unhappy. The officer was obviously from 3rd Mechanized Brigade headquarters, come to watch the progress of the anti-tank training. The men were supposed to wait in the trench for Dimitri’s tank to roll past, then jump out behind the T-34 and clap magnetic mines on the rear above the tank’s engine and air-filtration systems. What the colonel had seen instead was a tank driver thwarting the training for some amusement and torment.


The sergeant brought his gaze back around to Dimitri. Bugs buzzed in the tall steppe grasses. Other tanks on other training areas growled in their own exercises. Dimitri lowered his voice below the insects and engines so only the sergeant could hear.


‘Who is that?’


The sergeant kept his voice low, as well.


‘It’s Babadzhanian.’


Dimitri grimaced. Colonel Babadzhanian was the commander of their 16th Regiment.


Dimitri looked down to think, but also to look sorry.


‘Slap me.’


The sergeant bristled at this.


‘I will not.’


‘I was insolent. Slap me now.’


‘No. It’s against regulations.’


And if you don’t, I’m headed for the stockade. Come on, boy, show some balls and save me a week behind bars. I hate their food.’


The sergeant held still. ‘No.’


‘Your mother was a whore.’


‘I know.’


‘You should have been drowned at birth.’


‘I know.’


‘Then slap me.’


Dimitri shuffled his heels in the torn-up earth. This was taking too long.

Many more seconds and the colonel himself would stride forward to mete out regimental justice. Dimitri gritted his teeth.


Alright, Valentin. What will it take?’ he asked.


‘Your promise.’


‘What, to be good?’


‘Yes.’


Dimitri hesitated.


‘For how long?’


Both the sergeant and private saw the colonel take a step into the ring of quiet men.


‘Alright,’ Dimitri said.


Valentin’s hand lashed across Dimitri’s face, turning his head with the force of the blow. A good shot, Dimitri thought, over the burn in his cheek.


‘Private!’ the sergeant shouted. Dimitri sneaked a glimpse at the colonel. The officer was holding his ground.


The young tank commander laid it on. ‘The men in that trench are your comrades, Private. The Red Army has no place in it for behavior like what you just displayed! You will apologize to these men and you will in future conduct yourself according to the rules set out in the training manual. Or I will personally see you to the stockade myself! Is this understood?’


Dimitri stiffened. ‘Yes, Comrade Sergeant! Deeply understood!’


Everyone in the company who knew Dimitri knew this was more of his clowning, but they also knew no one had better laugh in front of the colonel, or Dimitri would not be so funny later.


Valentin stabbed a finger at the T-34. ‘Now get back in your tank. You will do another shift and you will perform your duties without flaw. Or there will be consequences. Move, Private!’


Dimitri ran the several steps to the tank. The green-painted metal was warm under the summer sun, filthy with flung dirt. With practiced ease and agility beyond his fifty-five years, he lifted himself and swung his legs through the hatch, settling into his seat. With swift hands he flicked the ignition switch and hit the starter. The diesel engine coughed and fired.

Dimitri pulled down his goggles and gripped the twin levers. This was the third tank he and Valya had been given. In the last year they’d had two shot out from under them, one in the pocket outside Stalingrad in the winter, one more in the lost battle for Khar’kov three months ago. With their tanks went two crews; twice, he and Valya had been the only ones to escape. Four dead, all the hull machine-gunners and loaders. And when you die inside a tank, you always die ugly. Dimitri looked around the compact room of the T-34, designed for battle, not comfort. Metal everywhere, and where there was not steel there were glass gauges. When the armor gets pierced by a shell, the compartment turns into a razor storm, a pit of flame, a gas chamber, any number of things that will kill you faster than a blink. Dimitri permitted himself a wistful second, recalling what he had seen inside these tanks. When will the luck run out for him? And Valya?


It’ll happen, he thought, somewhere on the road ahead. It’s always been there. So why worry? Dimitri laughed at this. He wanted a saber in his hand and a strong horse between his legs, to gallop off down that road ahead, to find what waited for him there and call it to a challenge. But he had no horse, he was a Cossack without a steed or a blade. Instead he gunned the engine of the tank the Red Army gave him to ride, he looked up at the long barrel of the gun this sergeant was given to fire, and for now these were good enough. Valentin’s head appeared in his hatch.


‘Private.’


‘Yes, I know’


Dimitri grinned.


‘Valya,’ Dimitri said.


‘What?’


‘Next time don’t smack me so hard.’


Valentin drooped his eyes and shook his head. The boy is always amazed at me, thought Dimitri.


Dimitri sprang the catch on the driver’s hatch and let it fall shut with a clang. He charged the gearshift forward, let go the clutch, and the tank surged ahead. He couldn’t see, but he knew his son had to leap clear fast.


* * * *


June 28

1440 hours


Dimitri rumbled the tank away from the training field to a clearing. He was filthy with dust and perspiration. Valentin kept him going back and forth over the trenches until the new tank was almost out of gas. He eased above the trainees in the ditch, even braked for them to catch up to him and lay their wooden disks, the fake mines, over his ventilation system. Valentin stood always in his vision, signaling him to turn and do it again. In his gritty cabin, Dimitri cursed the boy.


The tank, one of the new T-34/76 1942s, responded well. The designers had added only a few improvements over the 1940 and 1941

models. The treads were slightly broader, reducing the ground pressure per square inch, letting the tank handle better. There was added armor on the turret face and sides. The hull gunner’s position had a protected mount now. The turret overhang was reduced to keep from reflecting incoming rounds down onto the turret ring. The big difference was the longer-barreled main gun for a higher muzzle velocity. Shells fired from this tank would penetrate far better than anything the Red Army had ever mounted. But it still might not be enough. Dimitri heard talk of the new German super-tanks, Tigers and Panthers with massive guns and the thickest armor ever seen on the battlefield. When the fighting starts again, those new beasts will be arrayed across the steppe from him. Again, he laughed at his own worries, and once Valentin let him off duty, he parked his own new beast under a tree. In the shade, he rose from his seat, tossing helmet and goggles to the grass. He slid down the glacis plate and stood stretching his back and stiff neck. He looked out over this land the Germans and Russians decided would be the stage for their apocalypse.

Eternal swaths of reeds and grasses rolled in ripples of green and wheat.

This was beautiful cavalry country, classic campaign terrain, where giants could fit all their killing wares at once and surge at one another, to clash eye to eye.


Twenty miles south from here the Germans had gathered, with more land and air force than at any other time in the war, the reports said. A hundred miles north they’d done the same. Any time now, they’d attack from two directions toward the center, aimed at the city of Kursk, to pinch and surround the million and a half Russians defending it. In the south, there was just one road to Kursk. It cut through the town of Oboyan ten miles at his back. Dimitri, his son, and their 3rd Mechanized Corps straddled this road. Three major defense belts have been dug into the earth between Oboyan and the Germans. The Red Army had put everything it could muster in front of Oboyan, including Dimitri. If the Germans took this road, if Dimitri was alive to see them sweep north past him, he would be alive to see the battle lost.


Dimitri yawned. He turned away from the coming battleground and crawled between the tracks of the T-34. The gut of the tank was caked with soil and he kicked off dangling clogs to make room. The cooling aluminum engine ping-ed. Dimitri patted the tank’s underbelly, then curled over on his shoulder and fell asleep.


Hours later, when he slid from beneath the tank, he was stiff, his body cranky.


‘Alright, my lad,’ he said, standing with a soft grunt. He’d taken a shard in his right calf six months ago outside Stalingrad and never had it removed.

Over his half century of fighting and carousing and galloping, he’d fallen off fifty horses and been kicked by a hundred. He’d pulled plows when the mules were starved in the collectivization years in the Kuban. His knuckles were scarred and knobby from farm machines, swords, jaws, guns, and now tanks. Dimitri opened his hands, then worked them into fists. His forearms bulged no less than they did thirty years ago when he was a rider for the Tsar. His nails were stained now with grease and not the loam of the farm or the lather of a war charger. He opened one thick hand and laid it across the tank’s fender. He walked all around the tank, touching it, reached up to the thick turret, cooler now for its time beneath the tree. He slid his fingers down the long green length of the main gun, at its open mouth remembering sugar cubes and carrots, knowing he must ride this beast toward death and having nothing in his pockets to give the machine to please it and bond it to him.


‘Before we do anything else,’ he said aloud, ‘you need your name.’


Dimitri walked to another tank crew and from them got a brush and a canister of white paint. Walking back he read the titles given to others of the newly minted T-34s: Motherland; Our Nation’s Defense; Stalin The Father

. The commissars loved it when you dubbed your tank something like that.

Dimitri would not sloganeer for the Communists. He was the driver. This tank was his to name. He returned to his clearing and climbed aboard. In minutes, on the port side of the turret, he scrawled in large letters the name of his previous two tanks, General Platov, the great Cossack warrior from the bloody war with Napoleon.


‘Now, General,’ he said in a soothing tone, ‘let’s see what you’ve got.’


From his other two T-34s and over a year of fighting, Dimitri had assembled a box of tools he kept strapped to the hulls. With every tank he abandoned, the box was the last thing he scrabbled for before running for cover. He opened it now and took out a wrench. At the rear of the tank, he unfastened the hatch. The first thing in the compartment was the transmission. The makers of the T-34 were clever fellows. They knew the transmission in their tank was garbage, so they put it right where you could get to it easily, chuck a bad one away and shove in another. This location in the back had one drawback for the driver: it made the tank’s gears tough to shift because of the long drive train running through the floor. Dimitri and the other Russian tank drivers learned to keep a hammer under their seats for the more stubborn moments of the T-34’s transmission.


The next item in the rear compartment was the twelve-cylinder engine.

It, too, was easy to dispose of and replace. And spare parts were plentiful during action, a sad and smoking, sometimes burning, vista, but convenient for a buzzard mechanic like Dimitri. He had to hand this to Stalin: While the Germans littered the land with several makes of tank - and from the rumors were about to add two more, larger models - Stalin announced he would shoot any factory manager producing anything but his T-34. A thousand T-34s were pumped out every month in the Urals, to replace the thousand left charred on the steppe or snow or rubbled city streets. Stalin was also pursuing a new, heavier tank design, the KV-1, but these had not yet made any impression in battle, and as far as Dimitri knew there were none in the Kursk salient. The main battle tank for the Red Army remained the T-34, whether it was a good machine or not. This was the Russian way to fight a war, with numbers, massed waves of men and materiel. Lenin himself said it: Quantity is its own quality. The immediate problem facing the Russians was not with the amount of tanks available; every week there grew fewer and fewer trained men left to fight in them.


Dimitri dug his head into the engine compartment, looking over the heart of his new tank. And it was a good heart. The T-34’s motor made it the fastest tank on the field, always, with a top speed of thirty miles per hour. The engine was diesel, efficient, giving a range of up to 260 miles.

And unlike the Germans’ gasoline-powered Mark III and IV tanks, the motor also lacked the troubling tendency to blow up in combat.


Dimitri poked around awhile with his wrenches, checking bolts and hose couplings, filters and fittings. He talked to the machine, gentling it, getting it accustomed to its new name, General, and the feel of his hands on its secrets. The designers had three elements to balance when devising this tank: speed, protection, and power. Too much armor slows down speed, too much speed sacrifices the weight needed to carry a big gun and ammo. The T-34 was as good a compromise as any Dimitri had seen on the battlefields. And even when these tanks were knocked out by the hundreds, more kept coming. The Russian way.


Satisfied, he pushed himself out of the engine compartment. He bolted the rear panel tight and laid his tools in the metal case above the fender.


‘Another General Platov.’ Dimitri did not turn to the voice. Instead, he finished his chore. ‘Maybe this time the good General will have better luck.

How many lives does a Cossack have, Private?’


Dimitri crouched to wipe his grimy hands on the grass. ‘As many as he needs.’


Valentin stayed quiet for uncomfortable seconds. Then Valentin said,

‘It’s a bad thing when a son has to slap his father.’


Dimitri kept his eyes away from Valentin. The time mounted between them like something coming out of the ground. Valentin lifted himself onto the tank and into the commander’s hatch. The T-34’s large hatch cover hinged toward the front, forcing the commander to stand behind it. It was done this way to protect the commander during combat from ahead, but in the end it was simply cumbersome, difficult to see around, and the cause of many bloody noses during sudden stops. But Valentin looked good in the commander’s spot, peering down at Dimitri kneeling in the grass. He had a Cossack nose, sharp and long like a sword, a square jaw, and the blue eyes of the Azov sky, the ancient canopy for the Kuban and Don horsemen. Dimitri had passed to his son his own wiry build and black hair.


But the boy did not always keep his head up, and Dimitri lamented that he had given Valentin a Cossack’s body but not his soul.


Dimitri rose and stepped back from the General, to let the boy have it to himself for a while, for it was new to him, too. Valentin’s head disappeared into the tank, the hatch banged shut above him. In seconds the tank came alive. The periscope in the commander’s hatch began to rotate. Then Valentin worked the manual crank to elevate the main gun. The long barrel lifted to its full height, thirty degrees, then drooped to its lowest elevation, minus three degrees. The turret’s low profile made it a hard target, but the closeness of the gun mantlet to the chassis made it impossible to depress the main gun far. This restricted the gunner’s ability to fire at close targets, or to level the barrel when the tank sat behind a protective berm with the hull tilted up. So many compromises, Dimitri thought. So much left undone in the making of a tank, a son.


Dimitri watched the tank, silent and motionless now, wrapped around his boy. Together he and Valya had fought and killed, escaped and spit smoke and blood. Dimitri did not know how many German tanks they’d faced in the war, hundreds certainly. He had no count of how many they’d beaten. Enough to still be standing here, whatever the number. Valentin in combat was an excellent gunner, his marksmanship with the 76 mm main gun was as good as any tanker. But as a commander, when the bold time came, that moment in every battle when you face life or death and leave it to God to decide, the boy could hesitate. He waited for instructions, held in check by the Communists, who fight sometimes as if they’re afraid to go in alone, so instead they die in ten thousands. These times Dimitri took over, he turned the tank toward God and the Germans and told the boys over the intercom to keep shooting. The others in their crews, the ones dead now, believed he was insane. He wasn’t, ever. He was a Cossack.


The commander’s hatch lifted with a creak. I’ll need to grease that, thought Dimitri. I’ll need to groom the whole damn thing, and then some German will shoot it out from under me again. Valentin hoisted himself out of the hatch, dropping gracefully to the ground.


‘Good,’ he said.


‘I think so,’ Dimitri agreed.


Valentin stuck his tongue inside his lip. He looked at his boots. ‘I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment to you.’


Dimitri glared at the top of his son’s head, longing to yank Valya’s eyes up from the earth.


‘You’re soft,’ he told his son.


‘I follow orders.’


‘You follow Communists.’


‘Stalin’s winning the war.’


Dimitri held out one veined forearm. He pointed at the blue tracks marbling the muscle. ‘You see this? This is what’s winning the war. Russian blood. Not Stalin, not Lenin. Me. You. You know what the word ‘Cossack’

means. It’s Turkish, from kazak. It means - ‘


‘Freedom, Papa, it means freedom. We’ve had this discussion.’


‘And I want to have it again.’


‘I’m not going to fight with you.’


No, thought Dimitri, it seems you’re not.


The son, born under the reign of Lenin, turned his back on his father, born under Tsar Alexander III. He took several steps with Dimitri glaring at his back.


‘When will we get our new crew?’ Dimitri called, his tone controlled, as if he were a private asking his sergeant.


Valya stopped. He did not turn or raise his head. Face me, thought Dimitri, get your fucking head up.


‘In a few days, I’m told.’


‘Well, if you’ve been told, I’m sure that’s what will happen.’


The boy’s jaw was set. Dimitri nodded at this, pleased.


‘My mother was a saint.’


Svetlana. Dead. Starved by Stalin fifteen years ago in the Ukraine along with ten million others. There she was, in Valentin’s lean Cossack face, just for an instant, defending herself on his lips. Dima, Dima, you bastard! she’d shouted at him a thousand times; Dima, you fool, she’d laughed a thousand more.


‘Yes, she was,’ Dimitri answered.


Over the battleground of the mother and wife, father and son stood equal for a few seconds. Then she was eclipsed by the boy’s own spirit and Valya’s eyes dropped again.


‘Leave me alone,’ Dimitri told him, ‘and let me get this tank ready.’


Valentin walked away into the hip-high grass, following the tank tracks crushed there by his father.


* * * *


June 28

2315 hours


Outside the tarpaulin, the sun refused to go down. It’s late, thought Dimitri, go away, let a man sleep. Valentin, stretched on the grass opposite him beside the tank, snored. It was a young man’s gift to sleep like that. The sun hung on with desperate last rays, waiting until the moon could take hold full in the sky.


Dimitri rolled from beneath the tarp and got to his feet. The world was more lit than he’d realized, ridiculous, he thought, so close to midnight. The moon seemed hot and urgent. Standing in the grass, in the moonshadow of a tree, Dimitri appeared to himself white and cadaverous. How can a man sleep under this son of a bitch of a moon? he wondered. Go away, all of you, everything, let a man rest.


He walked past the four tanks of his platoon, then down the line of the twelve T-34s in his company. He lit a cigarette, strolling, trailing gray haze.

Hushed voices rose in the twilight. ‘Dima, can’t sleep?’ ‘Not nervous, are you, old man?’ Dimitri waved the dot of his cigarette at the good-natured taunts from under the tarpaulins, he moved through the thicket of youthful snores in the macabre light. There were forty-five tanks in his battalion, all of them parked in four rows. He walked until the signal flare went off.


The streak was green, a brilliant, crackling dot trailing smoke high into the moon’s reach. The ground shimmied under the flare’s flicker. The lighting of the world went backward, from dead to sickly, but the action around him was immediate. Emerald shadows leaped from their sleep, tarps were torn down, men teemed to their tanks. Dimitri cast away his cigarette and ran back to his tank.


This is not an attack, he thought, careering between men and waking machines. The German assault hasn’t begun yet. Even though the front line was well beyond the dim horizon, there would have been flashes of artillery fire on the rim. There would be air assaults, more flares around the 6th Army’s position awakening other divisions, more confusion, some panic. To Dimitri, this smelled of drill, another round of war games.


When he reached the General, Valentin was already standing in place behind his open hatch door. Dimitri was the last driver in their company to jump into his seat. Valentin said nothing while Dimitri cranked the engine.

The tank shuddered and the diesel added its racket to the rumbling night.


Dimitri slipped on his padded cloth helmet and goggles. He plugged in the interphone cable and buckled the strap under his chin, adjusting the throat microphone in the strap over his Adam’s apple. The earphones in his helmet buzzed. Valentin’s voice said only, ‘ Test.’


‘Clear.’


Dimitri glanced at the empty chair beside him; the Degtaryev machine-gun’s pistol grip had no hand on it. This better be another drill, he thought, we’ve got no hull gunner. And beside Valentin was another empty padded seat. We’ve got no loader.


Moments later, the tank in front of Dimitri pulled forward. He did not wait for Valentin’s order to fall in, but shifted to first gear and rolled ahead, allowing ten meters to grow between the General and the next tank, the correct amount of distance when traveling in column formation. He had no idea where they were going. Their destination was Valentin’s job, the commander’s job. Dimitri looked over his shoulder and up, to see his son.

The boy was folded into his seat, a map spread over his lap, a small light glowing over his head. Dust and smoke flew in the night air, mixed with pollen and torn grasses. The column moved with their running lights off, to avoid being spotted by prowling enemy night bombers. Dimitri couldn’t see the tank in front of him, so he drove the General straight into the dirty cloud that was its wake.


The column turned south. They stayed west of the Belgorod-Oboyan road, tramping up and down the rolling plain. They’d come this way five days ago, to stop at a narrow branch of the Solotino outside the village of Novoselovka. The first T-34 to cross the river bridge had cracked through the pilings and crashed on its side in the shallow water in a magnificent splash. Its crew broke some bones and the march was halted. Engineers were called up to make the bridge secure, something that should have been done weeks ago but someone missed it. Tonight, the column of tanks roared across the little span without incident. Jolting over the new-timbers, Dimitri wondered if that lead tank was still tilted beneath him in the water.

Probably, he decided. But there are no kids playing on it during the daylight.

The entire area along the bulge of the 250-mile-long front line had been evacuated and turned into a fortress. Every bridge was mined, a thousand of them. Every solid house of every village had a machine-gun in a window.

Roaring out of Novoselovka, Dimitri could not see one light in any dwelling, not one cow or chicken along the road. Where there are no chickens, he realized, there are no Russians.


The column moved without break for two hours, coursing south over fields parallel to the Oboyan road. In that time, Valentin did not speak, but studied his maps in his command position. This was the son he had raised.

A map reader, following the terrain on a sheet of paper instead of by the stars and landmarks. Dimitri’s father, Konstantin, could not read a word, let alone decipher a military map. But the old man and his horse were never lost, not on weeklong hunting trips, not when he rode across these same steppe lands beside his own son, galloping under a raised saber and the white flag of Nicholas against the tightening rule of the Communists.

Konstantin had taught Dimitri how to ride the earth like a horse, follow its movements, keep himself in its stirrups. Now Dimitri listened to the soft hum of nothing in his earpieces, from a silent son and commander. Dimitri had not taught the boy well. His old father would be angry.


Dimitri checked the gauges mounted just below his hatch opening.

The new General was running well. One shade of paint coated everything in the cockpit, a sort of muted, snotty mint. Outside, the tank was a deep forest green. All the T-34s were this color. The Red Army way, equality, the nail that sticks out is hammered down. Dimitri longed to roar out of the line he’d been in for hours, his hands ached with following.


Within the hour the column stopped. Valentin laid the flat of his boot between Dimitri’s shoulder blades, the unspoken signal to halt. Often during combat, when there was too much noise or the intraphone was broken, Valentin rode with his feet on Dimitri’s shoulders, guiding him with pressure to turn left or right; a boot to the neck meant forward, to the top of the head was speed up, two feet on the shoulders was reverse. The boot in Dimitri’s back was gentle enough; when the blood was up in the fighting, there had been some kicks. Dimitri shifted to neutral and idled.


Valentin stood in his place. Dimitri saw nothing but the rear of the tank in front of him, close and stinking of diesel exhaust. An officer walked along the line of tanks shouting orders up to the commanders. Valentin gave Dimitri the order to shut down.


The tank shuddered to a hulking quiet. Dimitri rose out of his hatch, filling his lungs with his first clean breath in hours. He lifted the goggles from his eyes; sweat had caked with the dust against his skin. He stepped out of the tank and slid to the ground. His legs needed a second to firm.


The dozen commanders in his company clustered around a captain.

Dimitri walked away from the settling fumes and heat of the tanks, a little ways into the surrounding field.


In the silvery light he made out dots on every hill, in all directions.

Perhaps two hundred tanks had been shaken awake hours ago and force-marched in the night to this staging area. Dimitri’s 3rd Mechanized Brigade was one of several units arrayed in an east-west line. The noise of tanks moving up on all sides sounded like the rattling of giant chains, there was a metallic moan to the treads eating into the earth, a whine from the engines, and Dimitri imagined this was the clamor of gathering titans.


One of the drivers walked beside Dimitri, offering a cigarette. The two men smoked while the commanders conferred and the tank engines cooled and knocked.


The driver was a dairy farmer from the Caucasus, an older fellow named Andrei. ‘This is going to be one shit pile,’ Andrei said. ‘This is our battle right here.’


The man swept a hand across the rippling southern plain, gray as gravestones.


‘That’s where the river runs, east-west. It isn’t much but the Germans have got to cross it. And that’s where the road branches. They’ll come right up from Tomarovka and Belgorod. And there,’ he swung the hand left, to the east, ‘is where the road splits off to Prokhorovka. We’ll meet them here, on the way to Kursk. Right fucking here, above the river. They’ve got to go around or through us.’


‘You and me, Andrushka,’ Dimitri said, patting the man’s back. ‘We’re the reason we’ll win. Hitler’s only brought his young pups.’


Andrei laughed, and he looked younger behind his cigarette. This is God’s bargain during war, Dimitri thought. If you face Him, face death, you are rewarded with living - truly living - every second you have left.


Andrei glanced back toward the tanks. The commanders were still confabbing.


‘How’s it going with your pup?’ he asked.


Now Dimitri laughed. ‘I’ve finally got him pissing on the newspaper.’


‘Well, there’s hope, then!’


Andrei dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. ‘Ride hard, Cossack.’


‘You, too, goatherder.’


Andrei returned to his tank. Dimitri flicked away his cigarette. He put his hands on his hips and leaned his head back into the cascading moonlight. He knew how the rest of the night and morning would go. Andrei was right, this was going to be their main defense region. Their battalion, all fifty tanks, would dig ditches deep enough for them to roll the T-34s into, hull down, so only the turrets were exposed. They’d dig shelters for ammunition, later in the day the shells would be brought up and stacked.

There would be practice in camouflage and target acquisition. They’d drive over the plain and mark march routes for wetlands and boggy patches, they’d ease past minefields and mark them, too. They’d identify lanes of retreat should the Germans push them back from this second defense line to the third and final belt in front of Novoselovka, the last stand before Oboyan and Kursk. The generals would let German spotter planes photograph them here, let them report to their own command how the Russians have occupied this fork on the Oboyan road. Then tomorrow night, after the T-34s had gone, engineers would build maskirovka tanks here out of barrels, hay, and poles.


Hitler’s waiting. He should have come at us months ago, when we were still reeling from the Khar’kov loss. Now, with the spring and summer, we’ve packed so many men and guns around Kursk we’re tripping over each other.


The Red Army generals definitely know where Hitler’s going to attack, even if they’re not sure when.


But Hitler knows something we don’t. He’s let the weeks go by without concern that the Red Army has dug in. The bastard’s got something up his rotten little sleeve.


This is going to be a tank battle, that’s certain.


That’s it, of course. Hitler’s not worried about our million and a half men, our three thousand tanks, or our uncountable anti-tank mines and guns. He figures he’s got a weapon to turn the battle his way, no matter how ready we get. He’s waiting for his new tanks. The Tigers. His super-tanks.


Dimitri had never faced a Tiger. The hulking things had only made fleeting appearances during the debacle at Khar’kov. But every report, every rumor, told that wherever the Tiger appeared, it dominated. T-34s by the dozens were left in wreckage by a handful of Mark VI Tigers.


Around him, for miles in every direction, more and more moonlit tanks pulled into position. The T-34 was quick, even nimble, with Dimitri at the reins. It had excellent armor, a strong main gun. He recalled Andrei’s hand sweeping over this small southern portion of the battlefield inside the Kursk bulge, studded with Russian tanks. Can Hitler bring enough super-tanks here to kill all of us?


In the sky, between Dimitri and the moon, a shadow skittered, like a crone on a broomstick. Then came the faint clatter of engines. The sound headed south, toward the German lines. In a minute it was gone, and the night belonged again to the dark, idling tanks spread across the fields and hIIIs.


Valentin appeared beside him. The boy, too, had his eyes raised to where the black flash had cut across the moon.


‘Night Witches,’ murmured Valentin.


‘Yes,’ Dimitri answered. ‘I saw them.’


He scanned the sky farther to the south, away from the moon’s aura, and caught what he was looking for. One star blinked in and out, then another winked in line, and he wondered if this was Katya.


* * * *


CHAPTER 3


June 28

2320 hours

one thousand meters above Syrtsev

ten miles north of the front line

Voronezh Front


The flying was effortless. Katya pulled her hands from the stick, her feet from the rudder pedals, and the U-2 flew itself, straight and deliberate, heavy with four 200-pound bombs strapped under the low wing. The night let her pass unescorted except for what she brought with her, the pop-pop-pop of her little engine, the flap of wind in the percale of her wings, and the siffle of air slipping through the wire struts that held her bi-plane together.


Below, the earth slid by, the color of cobwebs and ghosts, soaked in the full moon. Plumes of dust rose from the vast grasslands, the thin stalks were smashed flat in straight lines, the unmistakable sign of tank columns.

These are our tanks, she thought. Hundreds of them, on night maneuvers.


Katya put her hands and feet back on the controls. She shoved the stick hard to the left. Even laden with bombs, the plane snapped into a quick barrel roll. Blood rushed behind her eyes, bulging them, but she kept her stare on the dim horizon. When the world had twirled once, she returned the stick to center and leveled the U-2.


The voice of her navigator, Vera, seated in the cockpit behind her, nibbled in her headphones.


‘Saying hi to your papa?’


‘Just in case he’s looking.’


Katya scanned her dials and gauges. Air speed was sixty mph, at thirty-one hundred feet. The U-2 was made of plywood and fabric. A flight trainer before the war, it held no radio, almost no navigational equipment, no armor to protect a pilot and navigator who were without parachutes, and had a maximum speed of seventy-two miles per hour. But the bi-plane was steady in flight, easy to control, and capable of sustaining uncommon damage. It could be flown low and slow for accurate bombing runs and required very little room to land and take off. The U-2 was flown against the Germans, at night. It was piloted, navigated, armed, and maintained by squadrons of women.


‘How far?’ Katya asked.


She waited moments for Vera’s answer. The navigator had to compute direction and distance by landmarks and maps, also by a stopwatch. The plane’s compass would not work dependably in the skies over this region of the steppe because of the huge iron-ore deposits around Kursk. Katya marveled at the navigators’ abilities; it was these women’s job to get the bombers to the night’s target, then guide them home, steering their pilots on the darkest eves by stars and ticking seconds, in fog banks and clouds by instinct. Tonight the moon made Vera’s job easier while it made Katya’s harder. The pale light and clear air also provided a splendid backdrop behind their little plane for the Germans to spot them.


‘Hold at this speed and heading. Ten minutes, thirty seconds.’


About twelve miles, thought Katya. Good. If Papa and Valentin are below in that field, they might be able to see the explosions. The target tonight was an ammo dump.


Katya and Vera were the lead flight on this mission. The planes behind her would zero in on the fires they started. The entire regiment would be in the air, one plane every three minutes, all night long.


Katya took a gulp of the warm night air rushing past her open cockpit.

The U-2 engine pop-pop-ed and spit burps of blue flame from the exhaust ports. She mimicked the noise, popping her lips, bored with the straight flying and exhilarated by the thrill and danger of the mission, all at once.

She released the stick and pulled her boots up into the seat. Katerina Dimitriyevna Berkovna stood, bending her knees to miss the upper wing and fuel tank, and stretched her arms wide.


Vera, with a duplicate set of controls in the rear cockpit, made sure the U-2 stayed even, not because she was worried about her pilot falling out, Katya knew, but because to deviate would disturb her calculations.

Katya was trained from birth to stay in any saddle, on any horse, even a flying one. Now she sat down, feeling Vera’s hands release the stick to her.


‘One day,’ Vera spoke into the intercom.


‘One day for everything,’ Katya answered. She reached one arm out of her cockpit and slapped the cloth fuselage to pretend she could make it go faster. In her earphones, Vera laughed.


The ground below did not alter its outward character - the earth rolled by in brackish swaths, villages clotted dark and abandoned -but the forces moving along it changed utterly. The Red Army’s tanks gave way to densely packed outposts pocked into the earth, with clusters of anti-tank weapons inside trenches and behind sandbagged revetments and dirt berms. The defense works were miles in depth and as wide as Katya could see in the moonlight, but in minutes even these floated behind her. Then she was over no-man’s-land, a three-mile-wide plain of minefields and barbed wire, tank obstacles and ditches. Below, ten thousand Soviet soldiers stared across a lethal grassland at their German counterparts. Katya felt herself flying into a chill, the way she always did entering the airspace above enemy territory. The plane bumped, as if the tension coursing back and forth beneath it created its own turbulence.


She put her hand hard on the stick and eased out the throttle. Vera said, ‘Climb,’ and Katya pulled back on the stick. This was to gain altitude over the approaching target, as well as get distance from the first small-arms fire from the ground, soldiers aiming up into the gloom hoping for a lucky shot, recognizing the sound of the approaching U-2s, the popping engines, the slow and low flight of the woman bomber pilots they’d come to call Night Witches.


Katya took the U-2 up to four thousand feet and leveled. She waited for Vera’s voice, they were over the German lines now. The engine thrummed and the slipstream whistled through the struts. Katya fixed on a star low on the horizon and flew straight to it. The star made her think about her Papa. Papa and her brother, jammed like kippers inside a tank. Slow, heavy, and ponderous creatures, the tanks. No wind in the face. She smiled; if anyone can make a tank gallop, it’s Papa. She sent Valentin letters about her flying; he answered about what life was like trapped inside a can with their father. Her whole family was at war. This was the first time they’d shared the same battlefield; her regiment had spent the winter in the Crimea, Papa and Valya were at Stalingrad. Now she flew at night over their heads. Cossack families always go to war together.


Vera intoned, ‘Steady’ the way she always did in the last approach to the target, her calculations almost complete, and Katya pulled her gaze from the star. She felt needles in her stomach; she’d learned over more than three hundred sorties to ignore them. Another minute of engine and wind whipped by. Inside her goggles, a bead of sweat itched beside her nose. Every new second flew alongside, silver and anxious.


Then Vera gave the order. ‘Cut engine.’


Katya shoved in the throttle, the engine coughed and died. The propeller blades slowed to a powerless windmill. Now the plane sailed only on its wings. In an instant the feel of the stick and rudders was different; without the propulsion of the motor Katya rode the night air, not demanding but asking for flight, tickling the air for what lift she could draw from it to keep her plane and her mission in the sky. The U-2 was much more alive in her hands; the night was full of invisible gifts and traps and Katya had to find them.


In the rear cockpit, Vera lit two parachute flares and cast them out.

Katya banked left to watch the flares drift and lend their incandescence to the moon. The U-2 was down to thirty-five hundred feet now, low and mute enough for her to hear sirens blare below. She saw men run. Some dropped to their knees and fired, muzzles flashed on the ground, jittering under the swaying chutes. A spark struck against the engine cowling.

Through the wind she heard a ping. A round had glanced off the motor.


‘There it is!’ Vera shouted in the headset. ‘Ten o’clock!’


Katya stomped on the right rudder to skid the tail to starboard, snapped the stick left, and snatched the nose around to the direction Vera wanted. Looking over her wings she saw no holes ripped in the fabric, the gunners hadn’t caught up with the U-2 yet. Ahead, a large, fenced compound filled the center of the German encampment. Camouflage netting covered high stacks of crates. This was their target, the ammunition dump.


She dipped the nose and picked up speed, dropping five hundred feet to their bombing altitude of three thousand. The rush of wind grew in the struts. She leaned forward in the cockpit as though across the mane of a sprinting Arabian. Gunfire clapped from the ground.


The ammo dump was thirty seconds away. Katya nudged the stick forward and the U-2 plummeted another five hundred feet through the shreds of darkness left to her. Vera shouted, ‘Hold altitude!’ but now Katya took over. Vera had brought them here, but she was the pilot and bombardier.


The night split apart, rent by white swords of swinging light. With whomps of surging energy, the powerful searchlights of the German camp switched on one by one. The target was still twenty seconds off. Katya kept her course true.


The beams reached left and right, up and down, crisscrossing arms of light that would embrace the U-2 and not let go until the plane and its crew were shot to the ground. Katya’s heart pounded in her ears, it took all of her strength - as it always did, it was this way for every pilot in the night bomber regiment - to hold the stick firm, keeping the plane on its beeline to the target. She wanted to dodge the shafts of light, cut and carve the nimble U-2 around them like pylons. But she was here to blow up an ammunition dump, and there it was.


In that instant, a beam flashed across her windshield, making her wince. It vanished, slipping off the U-2 as Katya sped through it, but then another had caught her shape and swung in from the left. This search beam snagged her plane and gripped it. Another raced to its side and Katya was snared in the crossfire of light. She was blinded.


An eruption rocked the air behind her. The flak batteries had opened up. Katya jammed the stick forward. Behind her, Vera knew what she was doing and screamed, ‘ Go!’


In the last ten seconds toward the target, Katya shed altitude. Another flak shell roared in her wake. The U-2 rattled, shaken by the blasts and the gushing wind. The plane dove to fifteen hundred feet, almost straight down at the ammunition dump. The propeller, even without the engine powering it, whirled with the mounting speed. Katya swooped out of the spotlights, she left them swishing behind her confused, wondering where she’d gone. But her vision was stung by the powerful beams. She could not fix on her gauges or the ground.


‘Vera, can you see?’ she shouted into the intercom.


‘Yes!’


‘Tell me when!’


Letting the plane plunge, Katya put her left hand on the wire release for the four impact bombs. Another light crossed her path; she tore through it like a paper wall. She guessed she was at one thousand feet now, low enough to strike the ammo dump right in the heart and die in the ensuing detonation. In her earphones, she heard Vera mutter, ‘Katya…’


Katya gritted her teeth.


She hissed only, ‘When?’


‘Jesus, mother of God.’


‘When?’


A second, and another, a pounding in her temples, and in her hands gripping the stick and the wire…


‘Now!’


Katya pulled hard on the wire to release the bombs. The plane bounded, freed of the weight. Katya pushed the throttle in a quarter of the way. She fumbled for the magneto toggle, found it and flipped it down. The propeller, already spinning, caught fast. She rammed the throttle full in and wrapped both hands on the stick, laying all her strength and weight into it, pulling the knob back between her legs.


The U-2s engine, reawakened and fueled, howled. The plane leveled quickly but in two more heartbeats this was not going to be enough. She braced herself, waiting for the bombs to ignite the ammunition and wash a pillar of concussion and flame right over them. She shut her eyes and pulled back on the stick. She could feel Vera pulling, too.


The nose of the plane lifted. Katya opened her eyes. Her vision began to clear. Above, searchlights continued to scan, crossing each other like fencing lances. Katya had no prayer to say that would be fast enough.


The bombs struck. She felt the first kick in her tail from the explosion.

The U-2 increased its angle of climb, the engine’s bellow was lost in the roar of the ammunition dump below.


The next moment, the world became furious red and black. A fireball engulfed the plane. Katya gaped out into a swarming hell in the air around her. Flames lashed her cockpit, heat beat against her bare throat and cheeks, searing them. She flinched but kept her hands on the stick. The plane fought higher, up into the cloud of flame, then burst out of it into the shattered night; the last claws of flame reached for Katya and curled back.

Her goggles were filmed with soot, she yanked them down around her neck. Her skin felt slapped. She eased the climb of the plane.


Below, the dump raged. Commas of light shot out of the conflagration as cases of tracer rounds exploded. Magnesium flashes jetted from the stacks like lightning. Vera’s voice sounded in Katya’s headset. She said only, ‘Uh oh.’


Alarmed, Katya shot her gaze around the plane. The engine popped the way it should, the blue exhaust flames were reassuring. No problem there. She looked to the starboard wings and wires. By the light of the blaze below and the searchlights still casting for them, she noted that the upper and lower wings were singed, the percale had a few shrapnel rips. The paint on the U-2 was an acetate-based dope, extremely flammable. The brown and green camouflage pattern had blackened; smoke trailed behind the wing but no fire was visible. The dope had probably tried to catch flame inside the fireball but had been extinguished by their ferocious climb. She swiveled her head to port.


The upper wing there was also murky and smoking from the blast.

She shifted to the lower wing.


‘Uh oh,’ she said.


A foot-long piece of wood protruded from the cotton sheath of the wing. The thing had been shot into the air, probably from one of the blown-up crates, and Katya had flown right into it. The stick was embedded at the far end of the wing. At its tip, sparks glowed. The ember was trying to build a flame in the wind. If this happened, the U-2 would last no more than a few seconds. The dope-painted percale and the wood of the wings and fuselage would catch and burn before she could get the plane on the ground.


She shouted to Vera, ‘Hold on!’


Katya snapped the U-2 into a barrel roll. The U-2 responded, spinning wing over wing. She straightened and the stake was still there, kindling, angry at her attempt to dislodge it. She rolled the other direction; it would not be jettisoned.


Vera said, ‘Well?’


‘Well what? Go get it!’


‘Me?’


‘Yes! I’m the pilot. I have to fly the plane. We’re not out of the spotlights yet.’


‘So while I go out there on the wing you’re going to be dodging lights?’


‘Well, no.’


‘Good. Then I can fly as straight as you. You go.’


‘Why me?’


‘You’re the acrobat, Katya.’


What Vera meant without saying it was: You’re always playing the Cossack. Play it now.


Katya blew out a breath. She looked at the stake in the wing. It began to lick at itself with a blue tongue.


‘Alright! But if this ever happens again, you do it.’


‘Go.’


‘Hold it steady’


‘Go!’


Katya pulled up her goggles, wiping them clean with her gloves. She unhooked her microphone and tossed it aside. One last look at the gauges told her the plane was level at twenty-five hundred feet, too low, the searchlights and flak and even rifles could reach them here, cruising flat with the pilot walking on the wing. She stood on her seat, gripping the fuel tank above her head, and swung her left leg onto the wing root. With one hand wrapped around a wire strut, she lifted her other boot out of the cockpit and set it on the wing root. This was not like ten minutes ago, showing off for Vera; then, she could sit back down if she wanted. Here, if she lost her balance, she would lose her life.


Out on the wing, the ground looked much farther away, because it was no longer for her a place to land but to fall. The big, round beacons slashed in wild circles looking for her. Balancing on the wing it seemed they were so close and such hard girders of light she could step out onto one and slide down it. A flak shell exploded in front and to the right; she clenched her teeth and sensed the buzz of shrapnel. And then she froze.


She couldn’t do this. The prop wash and a sixty-mile-an-hour wind would blow her off the wing. The plane trembled in the shock of the flak, with more to come. Vera wouldn’t be able to fly on an even keel for long, they’d be shot down if she did, she’d have to roll and weave. Katya would fall.


She took firm hold of the strut wire with both hands and folded to her knees. For a moment she was stable, the wooden ribs of the wing beneath the cotton held her weight. Katya stared at the stick embedded there, about to bloom into a torch. She was afraid to move, and that was when she knew she must. That’s what Papa taught. Fear puts a bitterness in the mouth. The bitterness is your soul, Papa said, come up to see what you’re doing. On her eighteenth birthday, Katerina Berkovna had galloped wide open down the main street of her village waving a saber. She’d sliced in half every melon hoisted on the poles, no one else cut as many, not even the boys, and she was the champion dzhigitka of the Cossack war game. She’d stood in the stirrups at a rollicking speed and slashed her father’s sword, she didn’t fall then. Once in a while your soul wants to see a podvig, a feat, to prove you’re alive.


Belly-down on the wing, she made herself smaller for the wailing wind, before a searchlight glued itself to them and her heroics out here would be wasted on a plane that was being shot out of the sky. She braced her feet against the fuselage. With a deep breath, she frog-kicked across the sooty wing, skidding on her chest, the wooden ribs beneath the fabric bumping her own ribs. She tried to slide straight at the stick but the wind caught her and pushed her sideways; her left leg dangled off the wing, her right side was slipping and she would be gone. Her right hand stabbed up for the wire strut. She missed. She clawed at the taut cotton wing but the dope paint was slick and there was nothing to grab. She felt herself slide.


Vera broke the U-2 into a dive, dipping the front of the wing and flipping Katya back onto it. She reached for the wire strut angled above her head but it was too high and she missed again. Now she skidded headfirst to the leading edge of the wing, digging her palms into the fabric but finding nothing to slow her fall. Her head and shoulders cleared the wing’s rim. The ground was cratered with searchlights - giant unblinking eyes; would they see her tumble, follow her, white and garish, to the ground?


Katya held her breath, the edge of the wing was under her chest, there was nothing to hold her. She was beyond belief in that moment, no thoughts or goodbyes, there’ll be time on the way down. She went rigid with fright. In that moment, Vera pulled up and the wing tilted again, leveling itself. Katya screamed and lunged with her left hand. She slid backward and snagged the strut wire. The wing was level now. She was only a foot from the stake, which had finally flared into flame. Without time to understand or appreciate her reprieve, she scooted forward one last time, grabbed the burning stave, and yanked it out of the wing. She let it go into the night, feeling flushed and alive again, and hoped to drop the stake on some German’s head.


Sliding backward to the cockpit was faster. She knew now she would not fall; fate rewards the bold. The soul had seen its podvig and returned to its seat deep in the body, taking the taste of fear with it.


Climbing into the cockpit, Katya buckled on her microphone. She said nothing to Vera but instantly put the plane into a steep climb, then rolled right out of it to bank hard north for home. The spikes of adrenaline withdrew from her flesh, she took what she felt was her first swallow in a long time. She looked back at the ammo dump. The other planes gliding in behind her would have a bonfire to home in on. The U-2 roared, responding with gladness, almost gratitude, for the burning splinter taken from its paw.

Searchlights brandished behind them, grasping at nothing but the receding sound of the first of the Night Witches they would suffer before dawn.


They were past no-man’s-land and over the Russian lines before Vera spoke.


‘Katya.’


She looked down at the gray fields where the tanks had spread.

Lanterns were lit, men were digging, the grumble and clank of tanks reached her even through the whine of her own engine.


‘Yes, Verushka.’


Vera laughed.


‘One day


* * * *


June 29

0425 hours

Kalinovka aerodrome


Dawn arrived red-rimmed. Katya homed in on the landing lights arrayed beside the short strip of the air base. The lights were nothing more than three grease pots, hooded so they were visible only from a plane on the proper approach to the field.


She was tired to her bones. Even though she and Vera had only flown five sorties that night, the mission had been difficult. The scare she’d had out on the wing meandered in her chest the rest of the night. The flak had been thick and the air over the target acrid with smoke from the fires raging all around the German camp. After the initial raid on the ammo dump, with Vera still ribbing her as ‘Katya the wing-walker,’ they landed, refueled, re-armed, and waited while their mechanic Masha repaired the rents in the U-2’s wings. Within twenty minutes, they were airborne again, this time with the assigned objectives of knocking out the searchlights and anti-aircraft guns. These were smaller targets, and Katya and the other pilots had to glide in low and slow for accuracy. This was nerve-racking work, going right at the things they tried hardest to avoid. In the winter months, with longer nights, Katya could sometimes fly over a dozen sorties before sunup. But this past night was as exhausting as anything she had undertaken.


Katya brought the nose up, killed her speed, and settled the U-2 on the flattened grass. She taxied out of the way as soon as she was down, for the next plane in line behind her would be coming. This was how her 208th Night Bomber Division attacked and returned: one plane took off and flew straight at the target at a prescribed altitude, the next followed three minutes behind. After dropping their bombs, each pilot returned to base at a different altitude, landed, and was flung back into the air as soon as the plane was ready. The pilots and navigators drank coffee and huddled until the armorers and mechanics - all women in their Night Bombers Division -

finished their work and gave the crews the thumbs-up, then they were off again. After the alarms and explosions set off on the first sortie, the Germans knew where the bombers would come from and when. The only way the women would survive was to cut engines and glide through the night, and this was why the Germans named them as they did: Night Witches.


The U-2 rumbled to a halt. Masha ran up as soon as the propeller slowed to chock the wheels. Vera was out of the cockpit and headed for her cot before Katya took her feet from the rudders and pulled down her filthy goggles. The plane shuddered to begin its day of recuperation, and in the raw silence Masha whistled. Katya glanced around her scorched U-2

from the vantage point of the cockpit, now lit by the tincture of sunlight rising above the tree line. The plane was blackened and shredded, tail to rotor.

Bullet holes and shrapnel rips punctured the wings, there wasn’t a five-foot length anywhere without some hole and ragged cotton.


‘I heard you flapping in, you sounded like a pigeon.’ Masha laughed, shaking her head at the plane. At least you managed not to ruin my engine.’

She wiped a stained and knobby hand along the wing, leaving a trace in the soot. The mechanic’s days and nights were spent with a wrench and a flashlight, contorted into small, scalding spaces, rapping her knuckles against sharp metal, taping, sewing, and ironing patches over the wounded wings and bodies of planes brought back in wretched shape. Masha was no pilot, she could not fly and did not want to. She was a lover of machines and tools. When one of her wounded pigeons climbed back into the air, she waved her arms like a mother bird. When they did not come home, and the weeping pilots and navigators of the regiment swore revenge, Masha took to her tools to help those crews do just that.


Katya lowered herself to the ground. Her legs were achy and cramped. She tugged off her cloth helmet and tossed it into the cockpit.

‘Mashinka.’


‘Yes.’


‘What’s the count so far?’


‘Thirty-two out. Twenty-two in.’


For the next twenty minutes, Katya stood by her plane, watching more planes from her division land and taxi. One by one, ten more U-2s made it to the landing strip. Some engines popped, some skipped and struggled, but all ten landed and taxied. Only then did she turn from the field and trudge for the tent. She fell face-first on her cot. Vera was already snoring.


Katya dreamed of smoke and fried flesh. She reared on the cot from her stomach, up through flames the way her plane had catapulted out of them, scorched and in peril. Her ear just missed the side of a tray.


‘Ho, ho, calm down, Lieutenant!’


Katya waggled her head, rolling to her side. A plate of steaming eggs and sausage was held by her bedside. Leonid Petrovich Lumanov, Lieutenant, 291st Air Assault Division, sat on a stool, knees together, the tray on his lap.


‘Good morning, wing-walker.’


Katya licked her lips. They still tasted of sparks and exhaust.


‘Shut up,’ she growled. ‘I’m going to kill Vera.’


Leonid, a fighter pilot whose squadron was based at Kalinovka alongside the Night Witches, offered the tray. Katya sat up and took it on her own knees. Leonid was her best friend.


‘Kill Vera? Not after she saved your life.’


‘She saved my life? Vera told you… ?’


Leonid broke into a laugh and Katya felt ill-used. She rang her fork down on the plate.


‘Get out!’


‘No. Finish your breakfast.’


Katya crossed her hands in her lap to show her displeasure; her courage and danger had been reduced to an anecdote and a stupid nickname. Yes, Vera had acted quickly and well, but it was Katya on the seared wing, staring at the ground over the flying precipice, Katya who almost fell off the back and the front of the wing. But the eggs before her still steamed and the sausage glistened. She took up the fork. You’d best laugh at life, Papa always said, because it’s laughing at you. Leonid nodded approval.


She glared while she chewed breakfast. This was her way of punishing him, because talking was their favorite thing to do. Leonid flew the plane Katya wanted when she joined the Red Army’s Air Force, the sleek new Yak-9. Every day he got to fly high and fast, dueling with German Me-109 fighters and Heinkel bombers at 350 miles per hour, at six miles up, he soared leaving contrails of mist, while Katya popped and poked a few thousand feet up, always at night where her passion for flying was dimmed and lost in risk and tension. She had four little bombs, Leonid had cannons that could tear a hole in anything that got in his way. She was a Night Witch, he was a Fighter Pilot.


Katya was qualified for the fighters. When she graduated from the paramilitary Osoaviakihm in Krasnodar eight years ago, she was tops in the class, of both girls and boys. A year later, when only twenty, she trained at the Khar’kov Flying School and in her first year became an instructor.

Then she attended the Tula Advanced Flying School and graduated with colors. When the war broke out, she’d answered a nationwide call for the formation of women’s aviation regiments. She went to Moscow, was trained and tested more, and was certain of being assigned to a fighter assault division. Instead, she was made a night bomber, and there was no appeal.


She’d met Leonid the previous winter, in the fighting around Voroshilovgrad and the Terek River. He saw her standing by the airstrip during the day watching the Yaks come and go, made pleasant conversation in passing, then asked one day if she’d like to go up with him.

He snuck her into the cockpit on an early morning and put her in his lap, sharing the safety harness. From that position she flew, blasting through the cold Crimean sky, spinning the Yak like a dervish until Leonid reached around and took the stick from her, shouting in her ear that he had to stop her, anyone watching would know it was not Leonid Lumanov flying, he couldn’t do some of those tricks.


Leonid was a city boy, from Leningrad. He was educated and traveled, he’d been to England. He’d never known a Cossack, never been on a horse. In her U-2, Katya flew Leonid to a cavalry company resting in the rear. She put him in the saddle. The horse knew a beginner and took off like a shot. Leonid came out of the stirrups, hollering, What do I do? Katya controlled her laughter enough to shout back an old Kuban wisdom, the first thing her Papa taught her about riding: Don’t fall off! A cavalry officer galloped after the fighter pilot and brought him back unharmed and pale as steam.


When their divisions were separated to different fronts, they wrote.

With the erratic deliveries of wartime, the letters sometimes arrived to Katya in bunches of twos and threes. It didn’t matter if she read them out of sequence, it was good to know that Leonid was well and fighting. The letters had no envelopes; they were simply sheets of paper folded neatly and tucked in, after being read by the military censors. Neither of them ever scribbled of love. Katya had made it clear, she would not fall into a romance during the war. There was no room for that kind of attachment, there was already enough turmoil and grief to fill a heart.


Her 208th Night Bombers had been in combat now for nine months without stop, chasing the Germans westward after the massive Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February of that year. Their division had flown thousands of sorties, against hundreds of targets, in their cloth and wood trainers, in biting winter weather and broiling steppe heat, in open cockpits.

Leonid had never been one of the scoffing male pilots, those who thought women had no place in the sky during combat. Katya and the Night Witches had nothing to prove to Leonid. He’d stood beside the runway enough times himself, counting the returning U-2s, watching for Katya, and done the sad math. One missing, two, sometimes three or more, smiling for Katya when there were none. He told her many times the male pilots had to peacock on the ground because they were no more brave than the women in the air, and they knew it.


‘If sacrifice is courage,’ he said, ‘trust me, they know.’


Katya finished off the eggs and sausage. She handed the tray back to Leonid, who took it with the comic attitude of a servant.


‘Yes, your highness. What else can I do for you this morning?’


‘Come on.’


She unraveled her long legs from the cot, she’d not even removed her boots when she’d fallen into it at dawn. Leonid followed, carrying the tray out of the tent. Scattered around the base were over a hundred planes, U-2s, Yaks, and IL-2 Sturmovik ground fighters. The aircraft received service, fuel, oil, or armaments under camouflage nets and corrugated metal hangars. Propellers fanned in low idle while mechanics checked gauges, fuel trucks skittered every which way, grimy men and women worked side by side; the chauvinism of the skies had not yet taken hold among the tools and ladders. Leonid set the breakfast tray on someone’s wing. A mechanic shouted at him, but he and Katya kept walking.


‘Grab that bucket.’ She pointed to Leonid.


Katya waved to Masha, elbow-deep in another U-2 from their squadron. She stepped up on trig wing root of her own plane and paused to admire the patchwork Masha had done. The squares of cotton had even been blotched brown and green to match the rest of the wings. Leonid came behind her and whistled at the number of holes she’d brought back from last night’s mission.


Katya climbed into her cockpit. She called down to Leonid, ‘Set the prop.’


He dropped the bucket and did as he was told, shoving the propeller into ready position, where the starter could grab it and heave it into rotation.

Katya shouted behind her, ‘Clear!’ and nodded at Leonid. He shoved down on the propeller. The magnetos whirred. The propeller flung itself over once, twice, then the engine caught with a spitting sigh of smoke. Katya sat in the jouncing cockpit, smiling down at Leonid, who stood hands on hips, a handsome, admiring young man.


She let the motor run for three minutes, then shut it down. She climbed out of the cockpit, took the bucket off the ground, and held it under the radiator. Vera came running across the field, holding another empty bucket and a small packet.


‘Leonya,’ Vera said, shoving the bucket at him, ‘be a dear and go fill this with cool water.’


Leonid raised his eyes into his brows and turned to attend to this chore.


‘He’s nice,’ Katya said.


‘You own him,’ answered Vera.


The navigator unwrapped the paper packet and held up the new bar of soap she’d received in last week’s mail. Katya opened the cock on the radiator and filled the bucket with hot water. Big Masha came up, black from her shoulders to her knees.


‘You know you’re not supposed to keep doing this,’ she told Vera.


‘Yes,’ Vera said.


‘You know I have to refill that radiator.’


‘Yes, Mashinka.’


‘We’ll let you wash your hair, too,’ cajoled Katya.


‘But dear Masha, please, let us go first. There won’t be any soap left.’


‘This is the last time.’ Masha narrowed her eyes at Vera, always the jester.


‘Yes, Mashinka.’


‘I mean it.’


‘We know.’


‘Use cold water.’


Leonid returned with the bucket of well water. His boots were sloshed.


‘And you,’ Masha said to him, spinning on her black heels. Katya looked down, a greasy spot on the trampled grass marked where the mechanic had stood.


‘What did I do?’ the fighter pilot protested.


Vera took the bucket. She liked Leonid, and encouraged Katya in his direction. Vera had her own boyfriend, a navigator in a Boston A-20 - one of the Lend-Lease bombers from America - based on the northern shoulder of the Kursk pocket.


Katya mixed the hot and cold water in the empty bucket. She pulled off her tunic, down to her green undershirt. She bent over and Vera poured the warm water over her raven hair, cut short above her ears like that of all the Night Witches. Together, the two women washed each other’s hair, rubbing in the soap hard, while Leonid sat on the wing watching, saying nothing. Within minutes, several other women pilots were in the seats of their own cockpits, revving their engines, heating bathwater, and arguing with their mechanics. Katya and Vera were the ringleaders; Leonid chuckled at the influence they had in their squadron. Several male pilots walked by, probably, Katya thought, to get a look at the laughing girls in the wet undershirts. A few made snide comments, one said something to Leonid about him being the ‘Witches’ bath house boy,’ but he did not rise from his place on the wing nor even answer. Vera heaved a bucket of cold water in the jeering pilot’s direction, and Leonid had to go back to the well.


When the women had washed and rinsed their hair, they combed it flat against their heads and sat in the sun to dry it. Vera produced a small pocket mirror and the comb; the soap and these sundries were gifts from her bomber pilot. Gazing in the mirror, Katya noticed on her forehead and around her eyes her first scars from the war, the fine lines chiseled into her face from the constant strain and concentration of night flying, of wincing into the darkness to spot the smallest glimmers of targets and home, of sopping away tears on rough shirt sleeves. And though she would not admit it, she and every other Night Witch struggled and yearned to win the acceptance of the male pilots, so she flew sometimes harder and more recklessly than she otherwise might. Every one of her black, gliding missions, every friend who didn’t reach the landing lights at dawn, every flak burst and averted crash, even the sneers from the male fighter pilots, was etched in her face. Looking at herself in the mirror for those seconds, she relived it all.


Leonid sat on a bucket, kicking out his ankles in a mimicry of the gopak, the Cossack dance. Masha rambled back and topped off the radiator without saying a word. The two women reclined in the sun. Around the base, planes fired up and shut down, some took off, bombers flew high overhead on some mission to worry the Germans before the coming battle.

In the command hut, the next mission for the Witches was planned, the objectives often were arrived at by information from the partisans. After an hour of leisure, Leonid left them, then Vera went to write a letter. Katya stood beside her bi-plane, watching Leonid walk to his Yak-9 in his flight suit, watched him take off to fly his shift of patrol duty over the aerodrome.

He waggled his wings as he rose, and she knew that was for her.


* * * *


June 29

2345 hours

thirteen hundred meters above no-man’s-land

Voronezh Front


High clouds had moved in late in the day and stuck. There had been some afternoon thunder but no rain. Only pieces of moonlight shoved through the thick cover and the Witches sailed through a darker, better world for their mission.


Katya cruised, the third plane in line. The target was a new supply depot discovered and reported by the partisans. The U-2s’ bombs would rip open crates of medicine and bandages, foodstuffs, clothes and blankets. No fireworks tonight, no fuel barrels or ammo stacks. Onions don’t blow up. That’s what Germans eat, Katya thought, their breath stinks of onion.


She watched the unlit earth slip by below, listening to the engine sounds muted through her quiet headset - Vera studied her maps and the ground in silence, the only times in the day she had her mouth closed - and wondered why she believed this. She had not ever met a German, though she’d bombed them for almost a year. Why was it necessary to hate them for what they ate, or what they looked and sounded like? This was Soviet thinking, Soviet propaganda playing in her head, the barking commissars always lumbering around giving out speeches and pamphlets. It was enough simply to despise the Germans because they were invaders on Russian soil, not for their difference. Katya grew up among men and women of every walk: farmers, riders, poets, brigands, musicians, there were Circassians, Tatars, Kalmuks, Khazars, Slavs, Russians, all came to the Kuban to become Cossacks, difference was the lifeblood. I’ll blow up the Germans’ onions tonight, she thought, and their breath will smell like mine, then we’ll kill as many of them as we can, not because they stink but because they are here where they don’t belong. And the commissars can lumber off to hell.


She glanced over her shoulder at Vera. Her navigator held a flashlight across her lap, a stopwatch rested in the folds of her map.


‘It’s quiet, don’t you think?’ she asked Vera.


‘Yes, it’s quiet. Leave me alone.’


Katya let moments of engine and wind and night fly past.


“I don’t like it. I’m thinking too much.’


‘So stop thinking. And while you’re at it, stop talking.’


Katya turned around. She surveyed the horizon ahead for the flashes that would be bombs and flak and the white sashes of searchlights. She scanned her gauges and indicators. Everything held trim and smooth, blue exhaust fires blinked and popped astride the motor. She felt edgy tonight, and a scan of herself did not reveal why. Was it the mission, destroying medicine and victuals, was it worth the risk taken by the women? Was her jumpiness merely fatigue and stress? If Vera were talking at the moment she would say it was Leonid. If Papa were here, he would tell his daughter to be careful tonight, a Cossack can feel events coming on the wind. Katya fidgeted in her seat, drumming her fingers on the stick.


‘Come about a little to port,’ Vera said into Katya’s headset.


Katya twitched the stick and rudder and the plane flicked left.


‘That’s enough.’


Moments later, dead off the nose about six miles ahead, a small globe of orange pierced the night. This was the first sortie over the target.

Within seconds, enemy searchlights like angry antennae began to wave in the air, looking for the gliding little plane somewhere over their heads, the Witch that had whisked down on them.


Katya held the U-2 steady on the explosions. She would be over the target in five more minutes. She stayed at four thousand feet. Looking over her shoulder again, she saw Vera putting away her maps; there was no need for navigation right now, the supply depot burned and the searchlights guided them in.


Above the target, no flak burst. The Germans must not have figured their vegetables and bandages were much of a target, Katya decided, they’ve left them bare without artillery. But why, then, are there searchlights?


The second Night Witch released her bombs; another corner of the depot erupted with four small detonations. Beacons rushed back and forth, probing for the Witch, until they found her.


‘That’s Zoya Petrovna,’ Vera whispered, as though the Germans might hear.


Katya watched the searchlights intersect over Zoya’s bi-plane. The beams were so strong she seemed to be walking on them, like giant white legs. She’s a good pilot, Katya thought, and her navigator Galina Fedotova, she’s clever, they’ll get out of the lights. Zoya switched on her engine, rolled on her back, and dove at the ground, accelerating, pulling up into an inside loop. Katya watched and admired the maneuver. One spotlight then another slipped off Zoya’s skin. Katya lost her in the darkness. Good for Zoya, she thought.


But where was the German flak?


‘Cut engine,’ Vera murmured. Katya pushed in the throttle and flicked the magnetos off. Vera’s voice had been soft, Katya noted. She sensed something, too.


The U-2. began to glide, the propeller spun idly. She bled off a thousand feet of altitude, gaining speed toward the target now one mile away. The rush of wind picked up and Katya leaned forward over her stick as she always did, her galloping position. Her cockpit was lit only by the yellow luminance of the dials. Vera would tell her when to let go the bombs.


‘Steady,’ Vera intoned. ‘Thirty seconds.’


Katya watched the airspeed climb, altitude slipped to twenty-five hundred. She kept her head tucked and her eyes on her gauges. She did not see what made Vera yell, ‘No!’


Katya raised her head and saw the tracers, a stream of red darts a half mile away on her port side. At the end of the bullets, being ripped to ribbons, was Zoya and Galina’s U-2. Katya jerked at the sight, stunned. She mouthed the same word, No.


‘Night fighter.’ Katya heard the same fear in her navigator’s voice that thrummed in her own breast.


The Germans had a black-painted, night-flying Messerschmidt in the air. They’d never done this before. That’s why there was no flak.


Zoya began to burn. A searchlight followed her. She side-slipped, turning the fuselage sideways trying to keep the fire from the plane’s engine. Somewhere in the dark the night fighter banked and zeroed in again. Another pounding trail of tracers cut through Zoya like crimson scissors and then was done. Zoya’s plane was aflame, green and red signal rockets spurted out of the cockpits, a crazy light show. The plane did not explode but fell, torched. The searchlights abandoned Zoya and Galina and began their quest for Katya, who looked away before the dead plane hit the ground.


‘Vera.’


‘Damn it!’ the navigator cried. ‘Damn it!’


‘Where are we? Focus!’


Over the intercom, she heard Vera’s lungs work, the girl huffed hard to control herself. Katya kept tight reins on her own breathing.


‘Vera, stay with me.’


‘Yes, yes, shut up! Wait! Alright, stay steady. Damn it. Steady.’ The intercom went silent for several wind-whipping moments. Vera’s voice returned.


‘Alright. Get ready. Five, four, three, two…’


Katya gripped the bomb release.


‘Now!’”


She pulled on the wire and thrust her free hand at the magneto switches, then the throttle. The milling propeller caught and Katya blessed Masha. She looked up out of the cockpit and saw something whisk past, straight up in front of her, a blacker piece of the night moving at five times her own speed. She cringed. She heard the roar of the German engine and felt the turbulence of his wash in her own wings. The night fighter had barely missed running into them.


Katya banked left and dove hard for the ground. A searchlight brushed her starboard wings and that was enough for the night fighter.

Above her own engine Katya caught the howl of the Messerschmidt zooming down. The searchlight was gone from her plane but the German pilot had a read now on the slow-moving U-2. Red tracers ripped beneath her, she pulled up from her dive, just missing driving straight into the bullets’

course. The hammer blows of the night fighter’s machine-guns cut through every other sound of the night, the engine, the wind, Vera’s curses, Katya’s pummeling heart. Then she heard the slower thumps of cannon fire, and she thought this was ridiculous, that the night fighter needed his 20 mm cannons to stop a plywood bi-plane. The Germans are serious; they want the Night Witches cleared from the sky. And the Russian women made it easy for them tonight, sailing in from one direction, at one altitude. The night fighter was feeding on them like a black shark.


Katya banked hard right, plunging again to avoid the bright tower of another searchlight. The Messerschmidt screamed past. The U-2 rocked in the wake of his wailing engine. The German pulled up and away so fast, he vanished in an instant. Katya aimed at the ground, glued to her altimeter. At four hundred feet she leveled the plane out. The U-2 could fly slow enough to hug the ground and blend in with the earth.


‘He’s gone,’ Vera said. ‘Son of a bitch.’


‘No, he’s not. Get us home, Vera.’


Over her shoulder Katya caught the glow of Vera’s flashlight. The navigator was scrambling for her maps, gazing over the cockpit for landmarks now that the night fighter had chased them out of their prescribed track. That track, Katya thought. We’re going to have to change our tactics if this is how the Germans fight now. We were prepared for searchlights and flak, but not this. We’ve got no armor, no radios, no guns.

She wished Leonid were here in his Yak-9, blasting back at the Messerschmidt. That would be a proper duel. Not this.


As if to illustrate her thoughts, Katya saw the U-2 in line behind her become snared in the white web of the searchlights. ‘No, no, no,’ she whispered, beseeching God or whatever power flew with the Night Witches in their ancient, plodding bombers, but her voice was screeched away by machine-guns and engine whine. The red teeth of the black shark bit the U-2 above and the little plane burst in the air, struck above the wings in the gas tank. Not even the death of the Russian girls in their little plane was louder than the bellow of the speeding German, climbing out of the way to wait for his searchlights to find him another morsel.


Katya kept at four hundred feet over the smooth, dark terrain. Vera recited the names of the crew. ‘Marina Rudnova. Lily Baranskaya.’ This was her need to witness, to talk out her shock and anguish. Katya’s witness would be to survive, reach the airstrip as fast as she could, and stop the night’s mission before their regiment was annihilated. She flew straight and low over enemy territory while Vera gathered herself and her maps.


In a minute Vera had a direction for them to fly. Katya climbed to two thousand feet, safely away from the killing zone of the supply depot burning behind them. Thirty Night Witches had set the depot on fire, that was their mission. Each one, flying in line, saw the plane in front of her attacked, some destroyed, yet stayed on course, cut her engine, sailed over the target, banked through the lights, and did her job. Katya dreaded the final tally for tonight’s German vegetables and bandages. She could not spur the U-2 to go faster and her heart sickened.


* * * *


CHAPTER 4

June 30

2150 hours

Wehrmacht train moving east

Treblinka, Poland


Luis Ruiz de Vega lifted a hand to snare the attention of a passing waiter.

He waved his fingers over his plate, then made a sweeping motion to tell the man to take the dinner away.


‘Ja, mein Herr.’


Luis had been asleep over the half-full plate. He’d not touched more than a few bites. The train slowed herky-jerky and Luis opened his eyes. He heard the waiter’s German and remembered he was not in Spain, where his dream had taken him. He did not speak to the waiter - white-gloved hands swooped down dovelike and took away the tray of schnitzel and wafers -

and so did not switch languages in his head, but continued to think in Spanish.


He’d quelled the hunger, but he knew it would return soon. A year ago he’d been shot in the stomach by the Russians, leaving him forever with appetite. His gut had been cut in half, stitched closed in an emergency field hospital to save his life. And such a life it has become, he thought, looking at the hand he’d left dawdling in the air. He could not wear his father’s signet ring anymore, his fingers had shrunk too much. His face, his chest, hips, legs, everything but his bones and them, too, he believed at times, had been whittled away, the shavings of Waffen SS Captain Luis de Vega must be lying in a trash bin somewhere in the Berlin recovery ward of his previous eleven months.


He flipped the suspended hand over, examining his palm, then set it in his lap. In the way he’d awakened from his dream in Spanish, Luis awoke in his old form, strong and sinewy, five foot ten, the perfect physique for a man. It was the dark body that had earned him his renown, in the bullrings, then in the Civil War, next with Franco’s Blue Division, and finally with the SS at the Leningrad siege, his captain’s commission and his own company.

The feats he could perform in that body earned him praise, women, and his nickname, la Daga. The Dagger. He raised the shrunken hand to his waist to finger the sheathed knife he wore on his belt, a ceremonial blade given to him by his division. On the blade was written the SS oath: Meine Ehre Heisst Treue. My honor is loyalty. Funny, Luis thought, smiling a wretched grin, the irony of things. Finally I have become la Daga. I could stick someone with these hands.


To help wake himself up, Luis dug a knuckle into his eye socket. Both were bony, there was little cushion of flesh to him anymore. The chased-away dream was of the plaza de toros and his father: The old man was young and the crimson muleta rippled in his outstretched arms, bull, blood, and dust boiled around him, the arena was packed and hot. In those days before the Civil War, Ramon de Vega’s picture was painted for posters, tacked up across Barcelona, the matador’s son was his best banderillero, until the cape of Luis’s eyes lifted when the train stuttered to another stop and his father disappeared. He wanted the waiter to bring back the tray of food; he was hungry again. Tidbits satisfied him now only for short periods. He’d lost the old human habit of savoring; still, on occasion the desire for it came back like the echo of a missing limb. Luis swallowed saliva instead and looked out the window. How can anyone get anywhere, he thought, aggravated, stopping like this at every station and encampment?


A Wehrmacht major sat in a seat facing him. The man was overweight, his uniform belt bit into his belly folding into the red velour chair.

For all the habits Luis had lost, he’d picked up others. He viewed this major as a glutton, though the man had only a small roll about his waist, and the beginnings of a double chin. Before his wound and long, wasting convalescence, Luis was voracious for women and drink, a Spaniard set loose in wartime Germany; a muscular and hot-blooded Catalonian from the bullrings could have a field day among the cool fräuleins. Luis had not had sex in a year, what woman would have him. It would be like coupling with Death himself, white and skeletal. His little stomach could no longer tolerate alcohol or spicy foods. He would not laugh, what is funny to a skeleton? All his former appetites had been replaced by the one, hunger. He ate constantly - no, he nibbled, and this irked him, the memory of great skillets of paella and chilled jarros of sangria - and now he had become silent, his Spanish flame banked and his spirit pruned. Luis Ruiz de Vega had not yet become accustomed to what he saw in the mirror, and his hate for the Russians who did this to him smoldered like his hunger, it was never far away.


‘Where are we?’ he asked the major, not looking from the train window.


‘Still in Poland, I’m afraid.’


‘How far from the border?’


‘Not too far. Northeast of Warsaw.’


The village train station bustled with soldiers on the platform. The town seemed too small for all this activity. Luis brought his head around to gaze out past the curtains on the other side of the train car. Not far from the tracks was a high and vast barbed-wire perimeter. Inside it rose a solid block fence, many watchtowers, and the peaks of a hundred barracks. The place was grim and busy.


Luis looked back to the platform. An armed guard followed three emaciated men hauling a cart filled with the luggage of the debarking passengers. The skinny men wore blue-striped wool trousers and tunics.

Their heads were shaven over vacant eyes. Water could have collected in the hollows of their cheeks.


‘What is this place?’


The major said, ‘Treblinka.’


‘A work camp?’


The major chose his words. ‘Of sorts.’


Luis watched the three slaves shuffle the cart away from the train.

German officers, some of them SS, walked behind their bags, clapping others on the shoulders who’d come to meet them, some saluting higher officers. The SS were Totenkopf, the Death’s Head Division, the prison camp guards. To Luis they were fat. The slaves were the ones who looked like him.


He was careful to keep his distaste off his face in front of the watching major. There was so little padding to his features anymore, even a wince was a wrenching gesture. This train trip back to the Russian front was a revelation for him, and he did not like what he was seeing.


In 1941, Luis first crossed through Poland into the Soviet frontier as a soldier. He served in the vanguard of the troops, moving fast with the Blitzkrieg over enemy towns and cities, gobbling up territory and prisoners until his army hit the gates of Leningrad. There, the assault ground to a halt, and the old city was surrounded and put under siege. Millions of square miles of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia had been captured and occupied by Hitler. Luis did not know then the quality of that occupation. Why should he?

He was one of millions fighting at the leading edge of the war. The rear was not his concern.


Then he took his bullet to the stomach, standing beside his tank, one of the lousy Mark IIIs, near Lake Ladoga. A Red sniper got him. As a teenager Luis had been gored by a bull, he’d guessed wrong and the bull accommodated his mistake - his father did not rush out to tend to him lying in the ring; the matador came last and not until the bull was bled and worn down, that was the rule, even for fathers - and the Russian bullet did not feel as bad. But Luis’s bleeding did not stop and he would die, that’s what the medic told him. He asked for a priest, but there were none to be brought to him. And so he faced God alone, and God reprieved him. He woke in a hospital three days after his surgery and began his recovery. He spent four months in that hospital and seven in another in Berlin learning about his new body and withered spirit. He found bit by bit that he’d become almost impervious to passion; that was left behind in the Spaniard he was. He must always have food with him, crackers, cheese, something to keep him going when the small reservoir of his stomach was empty.

There was humiliation in this, it was a weakness, and Luis accepted it as his shame, and a small one as shames go. And this new body, with all it had gone through, the stitches and vomiting, so much of itself shearing away like melting ice, was almost unable to feel pain anymore. Luis, though rail thin, sensed he had become even more powerful than the distracted boy, the Spaniard, he once was.


He’d been given a few medals and ribbons and, when he was well enough, a black, tailored uniform and an assignment to return to the Eastern Front on this train as security officer.


Luis stood.


‘Taking a walk?’ the major asked.


‘Yes.’


‘I’ll come along, if you don’t mind. Stretch my legs.’


The major rose and followed Luis down the narrow corridor and off the train. Stepping onto the platform, the waning day was tepid and bland.

Polish weather, Luis thought, it makes for an indifferent history. This country has a tradition of being conquered. Luis walked quickly through the crowd, careful not to be bumped by any of the burly bustlers leaving or greeting the train.


He stopped with his back to the warm brick wall of the station. The major stood close, protective, reading Luis’s discomfort. Luis stared down the length of the train, twenty cars long. In the middle of the linkage were ten flatcars bearing brand-new Mark VI Tiger tanks. These were painted tan for the coming Kursk campaign, Operation Citadel. The tanks were marked for delivery to the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division on the southern flank of the Kursk bulge. The machines were behemoths, so broad their regular treads had to be removed and narrower transport tracks put on so they could fit on the train cars. The things were mighty-looking to Luis, they seemed proud and powerful like fresh, angry bulls. They were his to deliver to Leibstandarte. The Tigers were supposed to guarantee victory in Operation Citadel and turn the war around again for Germany. This was the third summer of campaigning in Russia. The Reds had not buckled as expected in the first year or two under the Blitzkrieg; in fact, they’d held and gone over to the offensive themselves after their big victory at Stalingrad.

Even so, the question was never the superiority of the German forces or the power of the tools at Hitler’s command, like this Tiger under Luis’s protection. No. Germany would beat Russia if given the time, if a breakthrough could be won at Kursk. But the war had dragged on so long, the calendar might soon run out of pages for German destiny. Why?


The Americans. They were coming, certain to enter the war in Europe anytime now The Americans, powerful, an unknown quantity, like an infant grown too big, were clumsy and unpredictable. But their presence on the Continent would split Hitler’s strength in half, he’d have to fight on two fronts. The Russians had to be broken before the Yanks landed, or the war in the East would take a sudden and nasty turn against Germany.


Luis had been given another chance, a rarity in war. He knew he could never win back his old body, the Spaniard; he believed he might surpass it in this new and deformed shape. He would do it in the days coming soon, in Russia, at the battle for Kursk, somehow. If the Americans left him time.


He had placed four armed men on each flatcar with the tanks. The Tigers were safe for the moment in this Polish town of Treblinka. There were no unguarded enemies here.


Without inviting the major to follow, Luis strode along the platform to where the concrete ended. He stepped down onto the blue gravel strewn beside every train track. He walked gingerly, the stones shifted even under his weight. Behind him, the major’s boots crunched more assuredly than his own.


‘Off to check on your Tigers, Captain?’


‘Yes.’


‘Quite the brutes, aren’t they?’


Luis did not feel this remark required a reply and picked his way along the track. He wished the major would go back to the train and leave him alone.


‘You’re one of Franco’s boys. The Blue Division.’


‘Once. I am in the SS now.’


The major sidled up beside Luis with one long, confident stride, then kept pace easily. ‘So I see.’


Luis wore the uniform of a Leibstandarte captain, except for two small irregularities. He was not allowed to wear the SS lightning bolt runes at the right collar, these were reserved only for Germanic members, and on his sleeve was a depiction of the Spanish flag in the shape of a shield.


The first cars behind the locomotive were filled with troops. Then came a dozen flatbeds, the first and last of them covered by green tarps.

Luis strolled along the track to stop beside the first flatcar bearing a Tiger.

Two SS guards facing him saluted with extended hands. He waved in the air, approximating the return salute. The two men gripped their machine pistols and went ramrod stiff until Luis and the major passed. The Tiger seemed impossibly huge up there on the flatbed, as though it might crush the supporting train wheels and platform. Luis had spent years fighting in the forerunners of this ultimate tank, the Mark IIIs and IVs. Those were toys, cap guns compared to this brute with its impenetrable armor and 88

mm gun. But the Tiger, like any weapon, had to be put in the proper hands.

Luis had been la Daga, had once been those right hands.


The major walked beside Luis the length of the ten Tigers. At each, the guards saluted and Luis did no more than nod. He ran his hand along the treads and wheels, sensing the hard thickness of the Tigers, jealous of their girth and purpose. All was in order, the tanks were secure, the men alert.


At the last tank he climbed up on the flatbed. A guard offered him a hand but Luis refused; he was thin, not helpless. The major stayed on the ground, watching him clamber over the tank’s treads then to the top of the Tiger’s turret, rotated backward for transport. Luis spread his feet and put his hands on his hips. He lifted his chin to the purpling sky in the fashion of his father standing over a conquered bull. But this bull, this Tiger, would be much tougher to put down. The metal radiated strength. The 88 mm gun was the largest cannon carried by any battle tank in the world. Its armor was the thickest. Its design was German. Its purpose was conquest. Luis felt an old stirring, standing up here. He could wrap a Tiger around his frail body and be frail no more. He would be this powerful, unutterably powerful, thing.


‘You look good up there, Captain,’ the major shouted. ‘You’ve stood on tanks before.’


Luis looked down on the major, heavy, earthbound. He answered, but not loud enough for the major to hear, only to himself. ‘Yes.’


‘What can you see?’ the major called up.


Luis surveyed the camp across the tracks here in Treblinka. From this height he gazed beyond the concertina wire and over the block wall. The camp sprawled in every direction, a massive place of incarceration.

Machine-guns were manned in watchtowers every fifty meters. Guards walked the perimeter with dogs. He looked back along the tracks and saw a separate rail line split off and enter the camp. The train cars inside the camp were not for transporting people but livestock. And there they were, the people of the camp, blue-striped and wilting, shaven-headed, shuffling, beaten, miserable in their final forms. He guessed at the numbers that could be housed in the endless barracks: twenty thousand at a time, perhaps more. A tall brick chimney dominated the camp, rising out of a rectangular building. A wrought-iron sign arched above the entryway to the camp, it read Arbeit Macht Frei. Work Makes Freedom.


Luis lowered his eyes to the colossal tank under his boots. Here were the twin faces of the war fought by Germany in Europe. The one face he knew; he’d stared into and embraced it - the face of battle, honor, this face was German in making but Spanish in spirit, hot and glorious. Yes, he’d been wounded and lost so much, but he did not blame war itself, these were the risks you took for the reward if you survived. But this other face, this Treblinka. Luis had passed this way three years in a row: once riding to the attack in 1941, when Treblinka was not the rear but a battlefield; a year later, he returned, flat on his back, sedated in a hospital train and he did not see the way Germany occupied the nations it mastered; and now heading east again, taking Hitler’s tanks to Russia, looking over this fence. The smoke from that chimney. Luis spit and watched the white gob fall far to the ground.


‘What do you see?’ the major asked again.


It did not have to be like this, Luis thought. The Polish people, the Russians, all of Europe, they might have been glad to have us, welcomed Hitler as a liberator from the tyrant Stalin and his atheist Communists. Not now. Not under the pall of that smoke. Now they will fight every inch, with every breath. Now they will all have to be defeated or killed, because they will never stop hating.


Luis raised his eyes one last time to the camp before climbing off the tank. The prisoners were starved, phantoms of men. I know well, he thought, very well how much you can hate the ones who’ve done this to you.


* * * *


June 30

2220 hours

Wehrmacht train moving east


Luis went into the bathroom of the train car. He wanted to clean off the sweat of his exertion from walking the tracks and climbing on the Tiger. He needed to wash away Treblinka.


He unbuttoned his tunic, raised his arms and splashed water from the sink under his pits and over his shoulders. He stopped and looked at himself in the mirror. There were the dark eyes of Luis but where was the rest of him? That was his black hair spread across the reflected chest, but where was the muscle? Those ribs, like the naked spars of a boat. He stared at the figure in the mirror, the close walls of the train’s water closet rattled around him as the train bumped along. He cupped a handful of water, leaned over the sink, and played the water over his brow and jet hair.

He gazed down into the white scoop of the china bowl, waiting a moment, then stood straight and looked in the mirror again. There he was, his image also the white of porcelain. He slicked his wet hair down and considered himself. He raised a hand to the mirror; the gaunt reflected man reached back and they touched. They spoke.


‘Lo jugue, y lo perdi.’


You played, and you lost.


Cool drips trickled down his chest, he watched them undulate over the corduroy of his ribs. He dried with wads of paper towel and put on his black shirt. When he was dressed again the mirrored man was a captain in the SS. This man Luis touched too, and he reached back, as well.


Soy yo,’ they said.


It’s me.


Luis returned to his seat. The major was still there. His eyes were closed and his hands lapped over his ample beltline. He opened his lids when Luis sat. He cheered immediately.


‘We’ve still got a ways to go,’ the major chirped.


‘Yes, it seems.’


‘I expect we’ll get to Kiev tomorrow afternoon and Belgorod sometime the next morning.’


Luis gazed out the window. The world whizzing by donned the first shawl of night, it would indeed be a long trip hauling those Tigers into Russia. The major seemed pleasant enough, eager to be obliging. Luis did not know the man’s name.


He leaned forward to shake hands.


‘SS Captain Luis Ruiz de Vega.’


The officer took his hand. ‘Major Marcus Grimm.’


The major made his own voice more comfortable than had Luis, an effort to put the younger officer at ease.


‘What division are you with, Captain?’


Luis sat back, ‘1st SS Panzergrenadier Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.’


He’d not been with his division in almost a year. It felt strange to say he was part of them anymore. He was a delivery man at the moment. He did not know what role waited for him in the coming battle after the tanks were off-loaded and gone from the Belgorod station. Would he be sent back on the train? Perhaps. But God had given him this second chance in Russia.

He would wait and see, it’s all one can do with God.


‘And you?’


‘Interestingly, I’m with 4th Panzer Army. I’m the liaison officer assigned to Leibstandarte.’


Luis nodded. Of course.


‘You’re here to keep an eye on me,’ he said.


‘Oh, no,’ the major laughed, ‘not you, really. More the Tigers than anything else. I’m just here to help. The Führer has a lot at stake on those tanks.’


The major smiled, taking in Luis. His eyes made Luis think there was much more to him than the major could possibly be seeing.


‘But I do think you bear close watching, Captain. May we talk awhile?’


Luis saw no option. The major was his superior, though he was not an SS officer.


‘Of course.’


Major Grimm settled into his seat, his hands layered again over his waist. ‘Tell me how a young Spaniard comes to be in the SS. Tell me about the Blue Division. And if it’s not still too fresh for you to talk about,’ and here the major waggled a finger at Luis, not at his face but at his body, ‘tell me what happened.’


The major’s manner was kind. Luis and he were riding a slow train through the night, over conquered lands. Luis recalled how he used to love conversation when he was the other man, not the one in the mirror. Over wine and cervezas, along the beach and in cafes on the Ramblas, with friends and lovers he would jaw and laugh, he had tales from the bulls and Spanish Morocco and the Civil War. And tonight this fat Major Grimm seemed to see the other man -the young Spaniard, as he called Luis. Not the victim. He saw la Daga. For Luis, this was the first time in so long.


‘Alright,’ he said.


* * * *


The bull charged into the arena flinging snot, searching, angry, bred to be angry. He lunged at the big capes waved at him in clumsy, hurried veronicas. The old matadors ran the bull about to charge him up, then finished and dashed behind the boards from the onrushing horns. The picador on horseback trotted in holding his lance high, his horse plumed and plucky. He did not wait for the toro but assailed it instead. Three jabs between the bull’s shoulders began the flow of blood down the shoulder and cut tendons to lower the bull’s head, bleeding him but making him wary and madder. Luis’s heart pumped with the bull’s, waiting for the picador and his stunning mount to finish. When the trumpet sounded, the picador withdrew, the arena applauded, and the next stage of the corrida belonged to Luis.


He leaped out, shouting Toro, beh! Toro, beh! He held his two banderillas, barbed sticks wrapped in ribbon, close over his head as though they were his own horns. He mimicked the bull’s pawing foot with his boot, raising dust and wild clapping in the hot, brimming arena. He took his eyes from the bull and glanced into the stadium, the crowd knew he was the son of Ramon. He’d practiced this move on leather bulls for five years, pushcarts in his father’s hands. Finally, this was no barrow with strapped-on horns but a toro charging. Luis waited, waited, he felt nothing but the barbs in his raised hands; the toro bore down and Luis held motionless. Then he began to run at the bull, at the lowered horns, not dropping his hands and the banderillas. Close enough to see into the eyes of the toro - they were black and blank with stupidity and rage - Luis vaulted aside, nimble as wind, and drove the sticks into the crimson gash opened by the picador. The barbs bit deep, the ribbons unraveled and fluttered and the bull thundered past. Luis thrust his empty hands in the air and galloped away under a canopy of applause. Blood spattered the silver trousers of his traje de luces, his suit of lights.


Once the bull was stuck more times by the other banderillas, the trumpet sounded again, and Luis retired to the wall to watch his father; for the first time Luis wore the silver while his father wore the gold. Out Ramon came for the faena, the last part of the bullfight, to music and shouts, and he butchered the bull. It was the worst performance Luis had ever seen from his father. Ramon de Vega was renowned across Spain for the grace of his maneuvers with the muleta, his nearness to the horns, the blood he swiped from the bull onto himself. The cape of Ramon was the passing of the veil of God for the bull, a daring and honorable final act. The trincberazo, with one knee on the ground. The pasa de la firma, where the matador stands in one place and runs the bull around him in a dangerous circle. The manoletina, holding the muleta behind the body. And the natural, where the sword, the estoque, is removed from behind the cape to make the cloth a smaller target, tempting the bull to charge at the largest thing it sees in its fury, the matador. Luis watched his father hesitate in all these, Ramon failed to engage fully and the bull lost its fury. His father’s passes were mechanical, not the flow of the blood and heat that was Spain and the fame of Ramon de Vega. The bull stopped and the father was left with nothing, the unsure crowd sat on its hands. Ramon dropped the muleta, pointed the sword, and waited. The bull glowered at him, exhausted and dumb. Ramon ran at the bull. The animal was done with it and stood detached. Ramon rose and drove the estoque between the shoulder blades and the bull stumbled at the pain but did not fall; the blade had missed the aorta. This was a disgrace for a matador. The art of the bullring was to live dangerously with the bull, then to reward it with a swift and beautiful death. Boos from the cheap seats in the sun hurtled down like thrown trash and Luis ran into the ring, unsheathing his knife. He approached the bull quickly. He measured the place at the base of the bull’s skull, in front of the golden hilt of the estoque wobbling, useless, and plunged his short broad blade as hard as he could to sever the spinal column there. He was sixteen years old and weeping for his father. The bull buckled and fell. Luis left the ring, the bull’s blood sticky in his fist. He found his father inside the toril, beside the pen in a corner. The man’s golden suit of lights would not go dim, even in the shadows of the pen. Luis held out the knife and his stained hand and said to him, ‘Father.’


The man’s eyes were as red as the blood on Luis’s dagger.


‘Father, a de Vega killed the bull. It doesn’t matter.’


‘I’m ashamed you saw that. I wanted it to be the best bull, for your first day in the corrida.’


‘Then it was the best bull. Because you wanted it to be. Thank you.’


His father looked at the knife. He sniffled and smiled at once, a wonderful maneuver.


‘You were fearless out there,’ Ramon told his son.


‘Because,’ Luis said, ‘you wanted me to be.’


An hour later, Ramon de Vega engaged his second bull, the final and the greatest of the six in that day’s corrida, and he was magnificent. He won the crowd again and was awarded two severed ears from the wonderfully dead bull. Circling the ring, Ramon held up the ears to the roaring crowd.


Luis walked behind him gathering off the ruffled dirt the tossed roses, wineskins, hats, cigars, and ladies’ fans.


The year was 1934. Luis intensified his apprenticeship under his father, learning all the passes, and perfecting his courage as a banderillero

. He would become the next generation of great matadors in the de Vega lineage. One day he came home and told his father his friends had come up with a nickname for him, The Dagger.


But around him, boiling about his family and the bullrings, across Barcelona and all of Spain, was civil unrest. The elected Republican government had for several years begun to unravel the ancient influences of the Church in Spain. Luis’s father despised the Republicans as socialists and middle-class reformers, handmaidens of the Communists. Ramon told Luis many times the government wanted to sweep away old Spain, a society built on Catholicism, monarchy, and the military, buttressed by birthright and honor. The Republicans wanted to reform the country into a little model of Russia, where there was fake equality among men, all were laborers, there were no peasants, no noblemen, and there was no God for anyone.


In Barcelona, a Republican bastion in Catalonia, Luis watched the violence grow. Priests were murdered - he saw a mob force a priest to lie on the ground with his arms spread in the shape of the cross before they chopped his arms off - nuns violated, and churches desecrated. Brawls spilled into the streets, it was the old and the new come to blows. Labor groups became vigilantes in what was known as the Red Terror, they rounded up suspected opponents and held midnight courts and dawn executions. Luis was kept away from the fights and the virulent politics by his father. But revolution was brewing. Even practicing his passes with the muleta and his thrusts with the dagger and the estoque, Luis saw the revolt coming.


In 1936, the Republican Catalonian governor shut down the bullrings, claiming the events were anti-Socialist. The energies of the people would be better spent building the new Spanish culture, not hewing to old, violent traditions. Ramon de Vega saw no hope for peace; a delirium was in Spain and it had to be thrashed out between the Soviet-backed Republicans and the unyielding supporters of old Spain, the Nationalists. He sent his son away from the bulls, into the Nationalist army, to serve in Spanish Morocco under his old friend, General Francisco Franco.


Within four months, the uprising in Spain erupted. Franco needed his army to come quickly from Morocco, and he got the help he needed from the German Führer Hitler. Luis boarded a German airplane with the rest of Franco’s loyal army and headed over the Straits of Gibraltar for the mainland.


For the next three years, Luis Ruiz de Vega fought in the armored division. His tanks were supplied by the Nazis and the Italians. They were all lightly protected, creaky playthings and pitifully gunned. Mussolini sent his CV-35, Hitler his Panzer Mark Is. Neither could withstand a direct hit from the smallest anti-tank guns of the Republicans, and neither stood a chance against the fast Russian T-26s with their 45 mm guns. Luis learned to be sly in his tanks, to come from the flank and behind, to dodge the horns of the enemy, always relying on speed and cunning more than strength. He earned promotions to squad and platoon leader, then company commander, leading as many as a dozen tanks into battle.


In the three years of the Spanish Civil War, Luis became an ace, la Daga, destroying more than fifty Republican tanks in the battles for Madrid, Malaga, Bilbao, Segovia, and finally, his homeland, Catalonia. He fought alongside the German Condor Legion, and began his study of their language. Fighting on the side of the Republicans were English and French, and Luis hardened his heart against these nations for supporting the Communist enemy. Franco’s alliance with Hitler led Luis to follow the events outside Spain in greater Europe. In March of 1938, Nazi Germany stormed into Austria. In October, Germany captured Czechoslovakia. Luis had no real love for the creed of the Nazis - their fascism and its required dictator, this would not be right for Spain; his own land needed the Church and its older, perhaps more backward ways - but Hitler had been a good ally and his troops were superb. In March of ‘39, Madrid fell at last to the Nationalists and Generalissimo Franco assumed power to end the Civil War, reuniting the country. Luis went home to Barcelona and his father. He was convinced that the New Order in Spain was going to flow from Franco; he knew, too, the new face of greater Europe would be Hitler’s.


Luis told his father he’d made up his mind to remain in the military.

This was where fresh glory for the de Vega family would arise, not from the bulls. Surely Hitler would conquer Europe. How could he not? Who would stop him? The English and the French had not lifted a finger to hinder Germany’s expansions. Nor had the Americans. The Russians had been whipped with German help right there in Spain, for all to see. When the European war came, Luis intended to help the Germans. When that war was won, he would return to Barcelona a hero, a powerful man, a de Vega with a debt from Hitler himself. Luis stood before his father a decorated veteran, a man in every right. Ramon took his son into the courtyard, gripped the handles of the old bull-barrow and rushed at him. After a half hour, the matador laughed. ‘So, you’ve lost your skills as a banderillero.’

Ramon gave his blessing for Luis to stay a soldier.


Within five months of the Spanish Civil War’s end, Hitler invaded Poland. France and England declared war on Germany. Franco kept Spain neutral. Hitler came to Spain seeking repayment for the debt of blood won by his legions, his tanks and planes in Franco’s service during the Civil War.

But the Generalissimo refused even to let German troops march across Spain to attack the British garrison in Gibraltar. After their conference, Hitler was quoted as saying, ‘I’d rather have three or four teeth out than meet that man again.’ Luis agreed with Franco; Spain had suffered enough in the previous three years. Over a half-million Spaniards had died fighting or by the executions. War had gorged on Spain, it was time to feed elsewhere.

That place was to be Russia.


Franco paid his debt to Hitler in another manner. He raised the Blue Division, twenty thousand strong. Their colors were that of the Nationalist Falange Party, they wore red berets and dark blue shirts. By handing the Blue Division to Hitler, Franco averted the threat of Axis invasion across the Pyrenees. The Blue Division, like the soldiers in every army who go to battle on foreign soil, was made up of every kind of man, with every sort of reason. Many were fervid anti-Communists or pro-German. Some were adventurers, others were starving in Franco’s new Spain and joined for the food and clothes. Most were professional soldiers in the Spanish army and war was their craft. The youngest ones of these, like Luis, went to invade Russia to coat themselves in glory for their return to Spain, or to find death instead.


The Blue Division left Madrid in July 1941, for training in Germany Luis, because of his combat experience and ability to speak German, was made a captain. In October, the Blue Division was shipped across the Russian frontier.


Luis fought to the gates of Leningrad. His Latin troops were brave and loyal, but were treated badly by their German superiors. The Blue Division was given poor equipment and worse support in the field, and their strength ebbed. America entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Hitler’s blitz ground to a halt at the approach to Moscow. By February of 1942, Franco began to press for the withdrawal of his gift to Hitler. The Blue Division became the butt of jokes in Spain while its men suffered on the frozen Eastern Front.


Luis did not want to go home. He believed the war on Russia could still be won by Germany. He needed to hold on to his chance to be as great as his father; he would change from Falange blue to starched black linen and silver eagles, to match the gold suits of Ramon. He would win with his own courage, not applause and flung wineskins, but power, that was the spoil with which he intended to return to Barcelona, a conqueror of Russia and Europe. He and his father would compare wounds, gored by bulls or bullets, and they would be equals. Luis asked to transfer into the Waffen SS, in order to stay in the war when the Blue Division was called home. Luis was accepted into the SS division Leibstandarte, retaining his captain’s rank, and given a Mark IV tank to command. He served with the SS for six months and in that time became convinced the German soldier was the most potent weapon in the world. They possessed Europe already. And they surely would not lose to the Russians.


Then came his wound.


While Luis lay in a hospital - cut open and closed again, a chunk of him in a bucket and tossed away - the world saw Stalingrad and the Soviet counteroffensive that shoved the German army all the way west beyond Kursk. While he convalesced, the Germans occupied their territories with death camps and slaves and showed themselves brutes, as bad as the Communists. While Luis learned again to swallow and walk, while his body dissipated, the war soured against Germany. He could have left the hospital and gone home, and he might have.


But not the way he healed, not with the flesh and time he’d lost. What did he have to take with him back to Spain? He’d not even told his father yet in his letters what happened to him. No. The only hope for Luis Ruiz de Vega was if the Americans would hold off their invasion in Europe, if the German assault on Kursk would go well, then he could get his hands on what he came to Russia for the first time with the Blue Division, and why he was here again with the SS on this train, rumbling across the border in the pit of night, late, tired, and once more hungry, talking with this fat officer.


To return with honor - to become the hero so he can become again the son and the Spaniard.


He did not say this to Major Grimm. But the German listened keenly and nodded, and knew it.


* * * *


CHAPTER 5

June 31

1010 hours

a Luftwaffe JU-52

altitude fifty-seven hundred meters above Rakovo, Soviet Union over the German front lines


Abram Breit folded to his hands and knees. He crawled out onto the thick, clear pane in the nose of the plane. Breit wobbled, unsteady even on all fours.


A reconnaissance photographer lay flat on his stomach across the swath of clarity. The man ignored Breit creeping up at his side. A blue and green eternity yawned beneath them. Only wispy pads of clouds seemed to separate them from the planet. Breit laid flat, too, and he thought they looked like riders on an invisible magic carpet.


The photographer snapped pictures of the army on the staging zone below. He plugged his headphones into a jack in the fuselage beside him.

Instantly his earphones came alive. He heard the pilot laughing at him.


Breit looked back up the companionway to the cockpit. The pilot quieted.


The photographer took shot after shot, flipping the film advance on his big camera. Breit finally looked down now. His chest squeezed. He laid his palms flat on the big plastic sheet to remind himself that it was there.


The JU-52 flew as high as it could go. Below, a tan and green immensity spread to every compass point; this was the Russian steppe, a vast ocean of grasses. Breit had been told about the dirt of the steppe, how it was rich black beneath the grasses and little forests. Dark telltales of turned soil marred the ground, betraying where German tanks, artillery, trucks, and tractors churned over the Soviet plain. The photographer recorded these scratches in the earth, the telltales of the German movement forward, this unprecedented concentration of men and weapons for Citadel, scheduled to begin in a few days.


Breit had instructed the pilot to fly over the center of the southern shoulder of the Kursk bulge, above II SS Panzer Corps. The three elite SS


divisions - Breit’s own Leibstandarte, plus Totenkopf and Das Reich - were arrayed side by side across from the dug-in Red 6th Guards Army. Abram Breit had seen these positions many times before, marked on large maps in the war chambers of Berlin, portrayed by little blocks with black or red flags for each unit. He had never before viewed a real army in the field, just in parades, an endless gray wash of men strutting past Hitler standing on high, arms jutted in salute. Breit lay with his chest and legs pressed against open blue space, a flying man, and gazed down for his first look at the loaded guns of war.


He knew all the numbers: as an intelligence officer and a spy, information was his sole value. Germany had nearly a quarter million men on the southern front, spearheaded by a thousand tanks and self-propelled assault guns, thirty-five hundred artillery pieces and mortars. II SS Panzer Corps alone held thirty thousand men, 390 tanks, one hundred self-propelled assault guns. The bulk of the tanks manned by SS crews were Mark IIIs and IVs, with a smattering of captured and repainted Soviet T-34s. The SS divisions fielded no Panthers, and only forty-two Tigers.

Abram Breit scanned the ground, slowly becoming oblivious to the discomfort of lying above the clouds on a pane of nothing. He envied the magnifying lens of the photographer’s camera, for it would bring him closer to the tiny forces so far below. Breit longed to catch sight of a Tiger tank; from what he’d heard of their gargantuan size, they ought to be visible even from up here. He saw a few wide paths in the dark loam of the steppe, considered they might be the tracks of Mark VIs, and thrilled a little. A new squeeze eddied in his chest, excitement.


The plane kept on course, due north. The photographer raised his head to load another canister of film. For a moment, he tilted his face to Breit, a red bull’s-eye circled one socket, then shook his head sadly. The photographer loaded the camera with expert hands and looked down, not into his lens but through the plastic floor, at the vast steppe teeming with weapons and soldiers. He shook his head again in private dismay, then lowered his brow to the camera and returned to his snapping and whirring task.


Hitler had assembled an impressive strike force here in the heart of Russia. To get it, the Führer had waited three months, much longer than some of his generals had wanted. But Hitler had to be certain he had in place a big enough hammer to break through the Soviet lines. And such numbers, Breit thought. To see those numbers on the page, then to view them in real life… remarkable. Powerful. The humanity, the machines, the materials, every bit of it as far as he could see was dedicated, cocked for battle.


The reconnaissance plane droned above a stretch of bare grasses, untrampled land, and gleaming streams. This open band was perhaps three kilometers wide. This was no-man’s-land between the two facing armies.


The photographer’s fingers accelerated on the camera. He took furious pictures. Breit pressed his nose to the plastic sheet beneath him, to see better what loomed below. Breath snagged in his chest.


‘Oh my God.’


The density of the Soviet defense works had been a startling thing to contemplate in Berlin when all Breit saw was facts and figures, intel photos, red blocks on broad map tables. He’d indicated the Red forces many times with long pointers, he’d moved them around like little game pieces. But this colossal network carved into the earth below him beggared his imagination.

This was no game board.


Confronting the German armies all across the southern shoulder, the Reds had built a great scab of six hundred thousand men. Nine thousand artillery pieces. Almost two thousand tanks. Breit was aware of the numbers, of course. But he’d never had an inkling that these hordes of Russian men and weapons were so incredibly well dug in. Sprawling to the horizon, trenches and earthworks rived the steppe like the veins behind an eye, uncountable channels splintered the dark dirt. Fat bunkers guarded every approach, antitank ditches resembled dry riverbeds in their hugeness, fortress-like berms surrounded clustered artillery. There were men, horses, trucks, everywhere digging, moving earth, stacking mounds, and gouging trenches against the coming of Citadel. Every open piece of land, Breit knew, was girded with mines and wire, pre-sighted by thousands of long barrels, rows of gunnery in every caliber. Deep echelons of tanks were embanked up to their turrets. Under the constant scratching of the Russians, the earth’s skin had hived up for them what appeared to be an impenetrable depth of walls and furrows. There was no path unprotected, no meter that would go unchallenged or unbloodied.


The Soviets had put to good use Hitler’s wait. While the Führer fiddled, stalling for another few thousand soldiers, for a few more Tiger tanks, the Reds had reshaped the earth inside the Kursk pocket.


Breit spoke into his microphone.


‘Pilot.’


The answer crackled. ‘Yes, sir.’


‘Aren’t we getting rather far behind enemy lines?’


‘Yes, sir.’


The tingle in Breit’s chest returned. ‘Why don’t they stop us? Where are their fighters?’


‘No need to worry, Colonel. The Reds don’t care. We’re not bombing anything. Just taking a look around.’


The pilot laughed again. In Breit’s earphones, the sound was tinny and wicked.


Breit’s transfer to Citadel had been unexpected, his orders arrived in Berlin yesterday morning by motorcycle courier. This was a promotion, he was appointed intelligence officer for Leibstandarte at the front. He was far beyond art and paperwork now, thirty kilometers behind Russian lines.

There’d been no time to arrange anything with his Lucy contacts to continue his espionage before he was transferred to Russia. Could he find a way to get in touch with his spy masters even here in the battle zone? Could they find him somehow? From the looks of things below, he’d already done plenty as it was. Perhaps too much? Breit was frightened. He wanted the defeat of Germany, yes. He was committed to this belief - he risked his life every day for it - that Hitler and the Nazis would lead Germany and much of the world to a bad end. But what else had he done by helping the Russians? Had he set the table for Germany’s annihilation? The battle that was shaping up below was going to be extraordinary likely the greatest land battle in all history. How much of Germany would survive it? Would he?

Breit wanted a cigarette very much.


The pilot continued, ‘Oh, they want us to see this. As much as we can.

Half those tanks and field pieces down there are made out of poles and straw.’


He did not believe the pilot, that so many of those guns were fake.

Breit had reason to suspect differently.


The plane traced the road headed north to Oboyan. Breit floated above three concentric layers of Soviet strongholds, each more formidable than the last. The photographer whirled through endless rolls of film.

Across the window, exposed rolls danced around him on the plane’s vibrations. Breit lay on his belly staring in realization and awe at what he had done.


The strongest of all the Soviet forces had burrowed in directly along the Oboyan road, opposite the three SS divisions. This was surely a result of the secrets Breit had stolen and delivered to Lucy. He had coded and dropped them in Berlin trash bins, left them on benches, in newspapers and brown bags, in the Tiergarten, in museums and alleys. And now, grown to inconceivable proportions, voila, there the secrets were.


This was a massive Russian army that knew every move the German generals had made.


This was Breit’s handiwork, his painting.


The pilot banked sharply for the German lines. Breit skidded on the smooth pane; under his belly now was nothing but blue air. His vertigo returned. On his hands and knees again, he scooted off the clear floor and stumbled to his seat in the fuselage.


Breit buckled in and closed his eyes. He was relieved that, for a little while, until this plane set down in Russia, there would be nothing more for him to see.


* * * *


CHAPTER 6

June 31

1030 hours

two kilometers east of Syrtsev

along the Oboyan road


Dimitri craned his neck back and gazed high. A big German plane droned, flying alone above lacy cloud cover. The cross of the plane was far in front of where its sound seemed to come from. Dimitri always resented this illusion of flight; it was a technological marvel created in his lifetime; he was a horseman, a plainsman, and a farmer. He didn’t like the trick played on his senses by the plane. But this one dropped no bombs and was not chased away by Russian fighters. This was probably only a reconnaissance flight, so Dimitri saved his curses. The Germans were snapping photos from three miles up of what Dimitri studied from ground level from his roost on a barrel.


He imagined what the German flyers saw. The yellowish-gray topsoil of the Kursk region highlighted every large-scale move made by both sides. The moment you turned the soil here over with a spade, a bulldozer, a tire or a tank tread, you uncovered that black steppe dirt, painting streaks on the earth like ink arrows that could be seen from the air with ease. So the Germans know what we’re doing, Dimitri thought, keeping his eye on the lazy enemy plane.


He lowered his gaze to the ground, to the immensity of the scars scratched in it stretching as far as he could see, and thought, I’d go home. I wouldn’t attack this.


Three miles below the high ground where he sat sky-watching flowed the skinny Luchanino River. On its banks, one mile to his right, stood the emptied village of Syrtsev. Two miles the other direction was the village of Luchanino. Every silo and home in these places had been turned into a fortification, embedded as part of the 6th Guards defensive works running east-west beside the Oboyan road. The little ghost towns were bristling with weapons and soldiers dug in behind their walls. Now the towns were solid with metal and a vigor that were never given to them in peacetime.


Syrtsev and Luchanino, and Alekseyevka two miles to the west on the riverbank, served their greatest purpose now, waiting to be destroyed, to maul the Germans when they came to cross the Luchanino River here. To Dimitri’s left was the Oboyan road, the grand prize for the German assault, potholed and shredded but busy anyway with tanks and trucks moving up.

Taking the Oboyan road was pivotal for Germany; the poor condition of Russia’s transportation system was one of the country’s greatest defenses.

Germany had to control the few paved surfaces to bring up supplies, fuel, and reinforcements. Sending their trucks overland through the endless bogs, overrunning streams, mud, and fields of this immense country was not possible for them. Russians alone knew how to navigate the eternal muck, endless snows, swelling rains, the vast distances, with horses, wagons, hand-pulled carts, blisters, courage, anger. This is Russia, Dimitri thought. It does not want to be conquered.


Overhead the German plane banked. It’s going to circle awhile, Dimitri noted, there’s lots to photograph down here.


He kicked his feet against the barrel, dancing his heels on the canister full of diesel fuel. He smiled, almost merry at the scope of the coming battle. This is how you fight a war, he decided. Historic. Big.


Dimitri did not know the numbers, the actual size of what he saw, and he did not care. It was enough that right in front of him - perhaps ten miles across on this clear day, crammed on this flat tableland of central Russia, from the Oboyan road west past the Pena River - was the greatest concentration of rifles, tanks, anti-tank guns, artillery, mines, barbed wire, blockhouses, and obstacles assembled in the entire war. All the big guns were concentrated and pre-aimed at key points. Over forty thousand anti-tank and antipersonnel mines had been laid in the ten-mile front of his 6th Guards; that was more than a mine per foot, over a million mines across the whole of the Kursk salient, the explosives laid during the spring in bare fields that were now overgrown with maize, wheat, mustard, sunflowers, and steppe grasses to make the mines almost impossible to detect. The defense works had arisen immense and deep. He’d driven his T-34 past these positions, called pakfronts, during weeks of drills and scrambles.

Sixth Guards alone manned two belts in depths up to ten miles and widths to twenty. And there were thirteen more Soviet armies with defenses just as solid throughout the Kursk bulge, with seven extra armies held in reserve.

There were eight defensive belts in all, the first three of which were gargantuan, and every one of them was connected by trenches, there must have been a thousand miles of trenches dug on 6th Guards’ front alone.

Dimitri shook his head at just what little parcel of it all he could see. When the Germans finally do attack, they’ll have to wade through more than hell.

Hell will be just their front door.


What kind of force have the Germans put together on their side to believe they can smash through this? It’s got to be just as big. Just as historic. Dimitri thumped his heels again on the barrel to let the stupendousness of the idea sink in. He was a part of this history, though just a small and insignificant mote. Beneath the humming German plane come to take his picture sitting on his barrel, Dimitri resolved that insignificance would not be his lot.


He stood from the barrel, his rear was sore and imprinted by the metal rim. He waved to the departing reconnaissance plane. Goodbye, he wished to the German pilot and photographer. I hope you got a good look.


He brought his eyes down to the massive groundworks growing by the shovelful in front of where he stood. The sound of the plane faded, the slips of clouds obscured the wings.


Dimitri stretched and yawned. He looked down the little rise from where his company of tanks sat under camouflage netting. One hundred meters away, a thousand civilians hacked at the earth with shovels and picks to excavate an anti-tank trench. He had been watching these girls, women, and old men work all morning, they dug like people out of the Bible, ancient Jews building something for a pharaoh, they filled buckets with dirt and the dirt was hauled away in barrows to dark piles, and these piles were hauled elsewhere to build protective berms. The ditch had grown to over ten feet deep and wide; it was perhaps a half-mile long. No tank could go into that and expect to get out. These trenches would serve to funnel the enemy attack to preordained channels, directly into minefields or under the sights of Soviet artillery. Dimitri had spent his morning watching these human ants nibbling at the steppe to change it, this was their own fight against the invaders.


‘Hey, Andrei!’ Dimitri shouted over to the next tank in line.


‘Yeah!’


‘Keep an eye on the General for me.’ Valentin was gone in a company truck to pick up their new crew for the General.


Dimitri recalled the Cossack fable about the old stallion and the young colt. The young one said to the old, Let’s run down the hill and get us a filly!

The old stud shook his great mane and replied, No. Let’s walk down and get them all.


Dimitri strode into the steppe grass, the reeds were as high as his waist, the color of bare and untanned skin. He ran an open hand over their tops and recalled the feeling of silk skirts, long, clean hair, and gentle, nervous flesh. It had been a while.


He walked to the lip of the trench and stopped. He was an old horse, yes, but he only wanted the one. He looked down at her, he’d kept a watch on this one all morning from his perch on the fuel barrel. She was one of dozens toiling below his boot-tips at the lip of the trench but she stood out.

She would not lean on her shovel handle and gab, she paused only to mop sweat from her brow. She assaulted the soil and heaved great heaping shovelfuls into the waiting buckets, filling them with only three or four loads of her spade. She was not lean like some hungry peasant waif but a woman, with curves and swoops in her figure, she was ample. Around her worked old men in hats and beards with shirtsleeves rolled up, and girls dressed in billowy blouses and patterned skirts with kerchiefs around braided hair. She laughed once at something one of the girls said and he’d heard her through the scraping of a hundred tools and grunts and flopping dirt. He picked up an empty bucket with a rope attached to its handle and tossed it down into the trench. It landed with a hollow thump just where he willed it, at her feet.


Without looking up, the woman righted the bucket. With a few deep stabs of her shovel, she topped it with dirt. She paused now to run her sleeve across her forehead. The bucket did not disappear the way it was supposed to. She followed the slack rope up the trench wall into Dimitri’s hands.


‘Take it away,’ she said.


Dimitri tilted his head at her now that he had her eyes on him. Her voice was like her body, deep and round. He liked it.


‘Take it away,’ she said again, knowing what the old fool over her head was doing. She made her voice an instruction, a schoolmarm to a stupid student.


Dimitri inclined his head as though she were royalty and tugged up the bucket. He dumped it at his own feet, not on the pile behind him where the dirt belonged, and tossed the pail down to her again. She raised her eyebrows and turned away to another empty bucket. She filled that, and found Dimitri at the rope of this one too, pulling it to the surface to dump the dirt again in the wrong place.


She turned on Dimitri. Even ten feet below him, her eyes were sea green.


‘You’re not helping.’


Dimitri put his hands to his hips. He pretended to be wounded by her scold.


‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’


Dimitri clambered down the slope of the pit. His boots skidded and he almost fell, the ditch was steep. His hurry and lack of balance made her laugh. This was her second laugh for his ears.


Dimitri tugged his shirt tail out of his pantaloons and pulled the tunic over his head. Bare-chested, he reached for the woman’s shovel. She did not hand it over. He locked on to her eyes and saw how she took him in.


‘What?’ he prodded, expecting her to comment on his slim torso.


‘You’ve got no hair on your chest,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the chest of a woman.’


Okay, Dimitri thought, good, the filly bucks. He pulled his eyes from hers and slid them down her.


‘So do you, my dear.’


She sent her face skyward, shaking her noggin at something up there, her God, a dead husband, something, and said, ‘Ha!’


She would not give up her shovel. Dimitri turned to the girl behind him, she was a teenager, and asked her if she needed a rest. The girl sighed in relief and handed over her tool.


Dimitri made a display of his strength and stamina. He dug two to the woman’s one, filled buckets, and showed impatience when they were not hauled up fast enough. He worked for fifteen minutes, almost to the point of exhaustion. He finally speared his shovel into the ground and left it. She stood behind him with a ladle of water.


He poured it over his head. He handed it back to her. She walked away to bring him another. Yes, Dimitri thought, she’s ample.


She returned with the ladle dripping. He quaffed the lukewarm water and ran a filthy forearm across his lips. Again she laughed at him.


‘What’s your name?’


‘Dimitri Konstantinovich Berko. At your service. And who are you?’


‘Sonya.’


‘Just Sonya?’


‘Yes, Private. Just Sonya.’


She did not smile when she called him Private. This was a hard one, this woman, not a silly girl from the villages. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, a well-preserved lass, even in these war years. She must be, in fact, a teacher or something like that, maybe one of those damned Communists. She was firm in her ocean eyes, even her smiles and laughter were resolute. Dimitri had the instant concern she was smarter and better born than him.


‘Yes, well.’ He made a face. ‘Just Sonya.’ He played the clown a bit for her. ‘I’m a private in this army. But actually, when there’s no war going on, I’m a hetman.’ He tapped his own chest, in the mud there from the dripping water. ‘My father was a hetman. And his father.’


Sonya pursed her lips, impressed. ‘What is a hetman?’


He narrowed his eyes. She doesn’t know. Ah, she’s too much trouble.

One more go-round, then enough. Back to my tank.


‘I am a Cossack leader. In my sietch, I am the final say.’


‘Your sietch.’


‘Yes, woman. My… my community. Village. Me. The little private.’


‘The dirty little private. Are you a tanker, Dima?’ This was the diminutive of his name, the affectionate form.


‘Yes. Right up the hill there. Those tanks. The 3rd Mechanized Brigade.’


‘You’ll be fighting here, then. When it starts. Around this trench.’


‘Yes. Along the Oboyan road. The Germans are going to give it everything they’ve got to take it. But I think this trench alone will stop them. I mean, look at it. You’ve done a marvelous job. There won’t be much fighting for me to do.’


Sonya took a deep breath and looked at Dimitri with softer eyes. He noted the change and heaped on more, this time for sympathy.


‘Me and my son. We’re in the same tank.’


‘The same tank.’


‘Yes. It’s an old tradition, Cossack families go to war together.’


‘That’s splendid.’


And my daughter.’


‘Oh.’ Sonya smiled her best yet. ‘Where is she?’


‘Up there. Somewhere.’ Dimitri pointed into the sky.


Sonya’s face fell.


‘Oh, Dima, no. I’m so sorry. Ay.’ She clucked her tongue. ‘To lose a child.’


No, he thought, you goose, Katya’s not dead! She’s a pilot…


‘How did she… ?’


Dimitri froze for the moment, raising a hand to wave off the incorrect notion. Sonya touched his shoulder.


‘No, no, Dima, it’s alright. You don’t have to talk about her right now. I understand. It must be so hard for you.’


Dimitri lowered his hand. He drooped his eyes to the dirt and sniffed once, faking. He left Katya unexplained. Sonya patted his neck. Katya would understand, he thought.


She pulled her spade out of the facing wall. Dimitri followed suit.

Sonya seemed to want to let some silence hover, to return to work, as though she dug now with a new purpose, for the dead daughter and the brave Cossack hetman who would fight beside his son here along the dangerous Oboyan road.


She bent to her shovel. Dimitri, behind her, gave her buttocks a squeeze.


* * * *


June 31

2130 hours


Dimitri stayed in the trench, digging with the women and old men, the darling of the civilians. When he did not come out of the hole in an hour to return to his tank, Andrei wandered up to the lip to check on him. Below Andrei’s feet, he saw Sonya and barebacked Dimitri with a gaggle of women around him. The dairy farmer doffed his cigarette and his tunic, too, and stumbled down the wall of the trench. He was welcomed, introduced around, and handed a shovel. Within the hour, a dozen more tankers were in the trench, sweating and flinging dirt and flirting like it was a holiday. In the early evening, they shared a meal with the diggers.


The air cooled with the lowering sun and the work slacked after the food. The sound of arriving trucks reached them down in the pit, come to take the laborers back to their camp miles to the east away from the front.

Andrei got a peck on the cheek from the girl he’d worked beside. Some of the other tankers, unsure bumpkins, backed away, muttering, Nice to meet you, and clambered up the slope. Sonya told Dimitri, Thank you, she hadn’t laughed as much in a day for years. Thank you, Dima. He reached both hands into the water bucket and dipped water to splash his face, then grabbed Sonya in a bear hug. Her breasts against his chest stunned him for a moment, it had been all he thought about the whole day hefting the shovel. He wanted to give her something but had nothing in his pockets, so he gave her a truth. My daughter, he said, is not dead. She’s a pilot. Sonya did not take a swing at him for his gambit; instead she said, So, you are still a hetman, you have a clan. Yes, he said, proud the way she put it. Yes.

You’re a good woman, he said. I am, she answered, and lingered in his arms, sea-green eyes flowing over his face. And you need to let me go.


This is when Valentin arrived at the edge of the trench.


‘Let her go, Private.’


‘Your son?’ she asked Dimitri.


‘Yes. The bastard.’


‘Go,’ Sonya said.


‘A kiss first.’


‘No. I don’t know you that well.’


‘I’ve earned a kiss.’


Valentin repeated his command. The sky behind him reddened.


‘Go, Dima. You’ll get in trouble.’


‘See. You do know me well! Kiss me, woman, and I’ll deal with the trouble.’


Sonya bent her head to his and they touched lips; the kiss was softer than Dimitri wanted but, again, he found she was plenty. He let her pull away first and open her eyes.


‘Another time,’ she said.


‘Another time, Just Sonya.’


He grabbed one more handful of her bottom and clambered away before she could consider taking a swipe at him. He flew up the trench slope to stand beside Valentin.


‘You should have gotten here sooner,’ he said to his son, looking down at all the women gathering their tools, washing their bare arms in the last of the water buckets. Then he made a face. ‘No. Perhaps not.’


* * * *


June 31

2215 hours


Two boys sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the General Platov.

They jumped up when Valentin strode into the glow of their lantern.


‘Sergeant!’ they said together.


Dimitri came to stand beside his son, who addressed the two newcomers.


‘Men, this is your driver. Private…’


Dimitri stepped forward before Valentin could make any more formal pronouncements. He held out his hand to each. Neither was out of his teens. More sons, Dimitri thought; Christ, more children to take into battle.


‘Dimitri Konstantinovich Berko,’ he said with each handshake. The boys had acne and nervous clasps. Dimitri felt expansive after his day in the trench with the woman, the digging made him tired in the good, old way of the farm. ‘Call me Dima. Tell me your names.’


Both were short, the way tankers must be. One was thick, the other lean. Dimitri guessed the chunky one was the loader, he had to be strong to sling the shells around inside the tank, out of the bins and into the breech.

The other would be the hull machine-gunner and radioman, if the General had a radio.


‘Pyotr Semyonovich Belyayev,’ said the stumpy one. His eyes were close-set. Beneath broad shoulders hung short arms. ‘I am…’


‘The loader, yes, I guessed. Of course. Look at you. Strong as an ox, I’ll bet. Good, good. And you?’


The thinner of the two was the edgy, pinched one. Both boys had buzzed haircuts but this one looked like a match head, there was something incendiary about him.


‘Private Frolov.’ His name had to escape his mouth as though words were prisoners in this boy’s head.


‘Private Frolov? I’m not going to call out “Hey, Private Frolov, shoot those Nazi fuckers for me!” in the middle of a battle. What’s your name, boy?’


‘Urn… um…’


‘Yes?’


‘Alexander Mikhailovich Frolov.’


This one will be fun, thought Dimitri. The quiet ones always are after you put some vodka in them. He guessed the skinny one would be the harder fighter of the two when the time came. Life for the quiet ones is a fight all the time. Good. He’ll keep his head.


‘Gunner extraordinaire, da!’ Dimitri clapped Frolov on the back to see how he’d take it. The boy wavered under the smack but looked up and grinned.


‘Good, very good. Sergeant, these look like good fighters. Well done.’


Valentin eyed his father.


Dimitri spread his arms, pushing the two boys together, tucking both inside his span as though measuring their collective width and worth.


‘Alright! Pasha and Sasha. Yes. And Dima.’ He looked back at Valentin. ‘And the sergeant.’


Dimitri took up the lantern and carried it to the General. He set it on the ground and folded next to it, resting his tired back against the T-34’s tread.


‘Gather ‘round.’


Pyotr and Alexander came to sit about the lantern. Valentin stood apart. This was the third crew they’d had in a year, and Dimitri had gone through this exercise with each. Dimitri walked over to his son and took the boy’s arm, leading him away to speak privately.


‘Come on, Valya. They’re children.’


‘They’re soldiers.’


‘They’re fighters, yes. And who are the best fighters in all of Russia?

Hmm?’


‘Cossacks,’ Valentin said with rolling eyes. The answer was their ritual.


‘Yes! So, you see. We have to do this, every time. Yes? Come on.’

Dimitri steered Valentin by their linked arms back to the lantern, the General

, and the two waiting crewmen.


‘Good. All together,’ he said, grunting a bit while descending to the ground again. Valentin took a place up on the tank, close but above the three privates. ‘Pasha. Tell me where you’re from.’


The broad one said, ‘Lesogorsk. Near Bratsk.’


‘Ah,’ Dimitri clapped, ‘a Siberian. Are you a hunter, then? You must be.’


‘I grew up shooting ducks on the Bratskoye reservoir. And foxes in the taiga. My father and I…’


‘Excellent, wonderful. You’ll tell us more sometime. Sasha, you.

Where is your home?’


The boy licked his lips. ‘Odessa.’


Dimitri looked up at Valentin. ‘You hear that! He’s from the other side of the Black Sea from us. Splendid.’


‘Did you two know the sergeant and I are Kuban Cossacks?’


The boys shook their heads and looked at each other.


‘What do you know about Cossacks? Anything?’


Pasha the stump said, ‘My mother used to scare us when we were bad. She’d say if we didn’t behave, she was going to call the Cossack and let him get us.’


‘What would the Cossack do?’


‘I don’t know. Eat us, I guess.’


Dimitri chuckled. ‘Your mother was a wise woman, Pasha. I might have eaten you and grown very fat myself. But as you can see, I’m skinny, so I never ate any children. Alright?’


Pasha nodded, like a child being assured a scary campfire story was just that, a story.


Dimitri reached to the lantern to turn up the wick. ‘Did you notice the name of your new tank? Sasha?’


Valentin, seated on the tank, sighed and this made Sasha take a moment longer.


‘General Platov.’


‘Yes. Good. I suppose you don’t know who General Platov was, so I’ll tell you.’


‘Yes,’ said Pasha, cupping his chin in his hands and digging his elbows into his bent knees. Sasha nodded. This boy did not ever seem to blink.


‘Before the War of 1812, Napoleon knew he would invade Russia. He set out to learn everything he could about the Motherland before attacking.

One of the things he found out was that the Cossacks of the Don and Kuban regions were the finest riders and fighters in the world. Better than the Mongols, the British, and better than the French, of course. Napoleon needed good cavalry if he was going to build an empire, and who better than the Cossacks?’


Dimitri slapped the tank tread behind him. ‘Good old General Platov here was the hetman of the Don Cossacks. He got a letter from Bonaparte himself, inviting him to visit Paris to be His Majesty’s guest. When Platov got to France, Napoleon and all of his generals kissed his ass like he was a king himself. They showed him all the wonders of Paris, held fancy balls in his honor, even a parade! All this to get their hands on General Platov’s Cossacks. And Platov, you see, was no dummy. He knew what Bonaparte was up to.’


The lantern light reached high enough on the tank for Dimitri to see his son listening, knowing the story well but allowing the father’s gift of the telling.


‘Finally, Napoleon made his move on the General. He sat Platov down in a giant parlor of gold and silk, and said to him, “General, such a man as you should be a prince in your country. You command thousands of fighters, but you are treated with no honor by your own king. France can offer you this honor, for you and your Cossacks. Side with us, General. It would do you and your people good to become acquainted with the cultures of France and Europe.” The General kept his opinion to himself, that Napoleon had spoken as though, without French culture, his Cossacks were savages!’


Pasha and Sasha laughed. Even Valentin snickered, this was a new line Dimitri threw into the tale.


‘Napoleon made his offer. “General,” he said, “I would give anything you asked if I could have Cossacks on my side. With twenty thousand of the best cavalrymen in the world fighting with France, no one could stop us.” Platov listened, rubbed his beard, and answered, “I see no problem.

This is a very easy thing to do.” Well, Napoleon could hardly believe his ears. “How can we do this, General?” he begged. “Tell me what you require.” The General stood in the grand, golden room of Napoleon and said, “It’s a simple thing. I will bring twenty thousand of my finest young riders to Paris for a few days. You will bring twenty thousand of your prettiest French girls to Paris. We will let Nature take its course, and in twenty years or so you will have your own twenty thousand French Cossacks!”‘

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