Last Citadel

He plunged his right hand for it, snared it, and pulled, accepting that this was his last chance.

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

Breit was stricken by how close he was to the ground, the vast, twilit steppe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breit ran through a flat expanse of grass. The Yaks rolled again in formation, were they coming back for him? His breathing filled his ears, he didn’t know how to escape, he was no combat soldier. He dove into the thin reeds and lay still, panting. After seconds he peeked above the heads of the stalks. The fighters had cut short their circle and flew off to the north.

Breit saw only the descent of the dead airman, who returned to earth without a whisper. The sky was clear and tinting red, stained.

* * * *

July 9

0005 hours

somewhere west of Slatino

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

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

Tonight he was special, a survivor. He carried the keys to history in his head. He felt alert and exhilarated.

Twice in the late dusk he saw locals moving across the grassland before the nightfall curfew. One group led a mule back from the plow somewhere. The old men and women stopped and gawked at the German plane burning at the far end of the field in the last red glow of day. A half hour after that, Breit lay on his stomach, pressed to the ground, as two peasants came near to harvest the silk of the collapsed chutes. He worried that the two old men might see the track of crushed stalks where he’d run from his chute, ending where he now lay. They would find him and do what?

He was a German officer. They wouldn’t dare touch him. The reprisals on their village would be fierce. He hid anyway, not certain. The men cut the white chutes from the cords and lapped them around their shoulders. They left the airman’s grisly body alone and continued across the field chattering over their good fortune.

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

Someone would come, certainly, but not tonight.

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

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

He stepped into what felt like a hole, his boot did not find the ground.

He collapsed toward it. In an exploding moment, the stars burst. They were fleeting and canceled by the ground striking his bad shoulder, then cuffing his face. Light flared in his eyes. Breit knew light though he could never paint it, and he knew this light was false, rupturing only inside him. Before he shut his eyes from the glare, he caught the ovals of boots, the cylinders of pants legs.

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

* * * *

CHAPTER 16

July 9

0310 hours

moving north with the 3rd Mechanized Brigade

along the Oboyan road

Dimitri could not even muster a spit. His mouth was a pit coated with diesel soot and dust. He rode on top of the General, clinging to a handle behind the turret, sitting on the deck above the hot engine. Sasha had asked to drive tonight for a portion of the retreat, to let Dimitri rest and get some air.

The skinny boy, even with a chunk torn out of his biceps from a German bullet, had an adequate touch with the T-34, there was more strength in him than you could read by looking at him.

The air had cooled since midnight. Dank sheets of mist filled the hollows and dips of the fields under a waxing moon. On all sides of the General, the remnants of 3rd Mechanized Corps beat across the steppe, fleeing north to find another place to defend the Oboyan road now that it had lost Syrtsev, Alekseyevka, and the Luchanino River. Dimitri was thirsty.

Every crevice from his crotch to his eyelids was caked with a paste of sweat, dust, and exhaust fumes. Overhead the stars glittered and the night was calm, but Dimitri did not see the black curtain; instead he projected on it the fighting, the flames and blasts that had claimed sixty T-34s and their crews, two out of three in his battalion. Their hulks and bodies rested tonight on ground ceded back to the Germans. That was the worst taste on his tongue, the retreat.

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

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

Dimitri sat numb.

He jolted awake, his eyes snapped open. The General had stopped in the night. Other machines by the dozens trundled by, continuing the retreat. The moon showed them rising across a broad sloping face; they’d come to the foot of a slow rise. The Oboyan road ran straight up its middle.

This would be the next line of defense. On the steppe, any high ground was worth dying for.

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

He kept his perch on the tank, watching columns stagger alongside the rising road. Mechanics came and added oil to the General’s motor. An armaments wagon stopped and off-loaded stacks of shells. A barrel of diesel was dumped into the fuel tank. None of this clatter awoke Pasha or Sasha. Valentin was gone into the gloom to meet with platoon leaders from whichever armored companies had made this backward trip with them.

Dimitri slumped against the turret. His tank squad was all dead. His company had been decimated and dispersed. His crew had gone silent, his son was severed from him, his pilot daughter off somewhere facing who knew what, his army was in retreat.

* * * *

July 9

0520 hours

at the foot of Hill 260.

third Soviet defense belt

the Oboyan road

Dimitri cracked his lids. The color he saw in the sky made him shut them again. The dawn had come bluish pink, it looked like meat, the insides of a man. Because he could not close his ears he heard noises: shovels, and he thought of graves. A vivid, foul mood had taken him in his sleep. He lay curled on his side, arms crossed, the ground crawled with vibrations. He wanted peace and comfort, his family and his village around him, a drink, a woman, and a horse, he wanted labor where no one was killed, food from a stove served on a table. Everything he desired had been ripped from him by three years of fighting, and he was at last like the Red Army stretched across the Oboyan road, down to his last defenses. He screwed down his lids, tightened his arms, and refused to wake up.

When finally a tap came at the sole of his boots, he ignored it. I’ve done enough, he thought. I’ve given enough. I’m down to me. Leave me alone.

Someone kicked a bit harder at his feet. Dimitri sprang from his curl like a sprung trap. He felt no pain or night stiffness, nothing but the lunge and it felt good, violent, released. Blindly, he gripped a tunic with both hands, he drove the body he clutched against the side of the tank. He screamed into the flesh in front of his nose and did not know what he screamed.

He heard his name, ‘Dima, Dima…’ His breathing came hard, steaming with anger, filling his ears. ‘Dima, let me go…’

Other hands took him by the shoulders. They did not tug to peel him away but were gentler hands that told him they were there, careful and frightened. He pushed himself back from his clutch. The face above the throat he gripped was round and red and stupid. Pasha. Pasha had come to wake him. The other boy, Sasha, stood behind Dimitri, speaking. ‘It’s alright, Dima. Dima, calm down, it’s us.’

Dimitri let Pasha’s tunic loose. The boy looked scared and indignant all at once. He rubbed the back of his crewcut where Dimitri had rammed him into the General. ‘What was that about?’ he muttered. Dimitri gave no answer or apology. He slumped away to the back of the tank with the two boys staring after him. He walked a few steps and undid his fly to take a leak. He was dehydrated and could barely piss.

When he was finished, Dimitri gazed up the hill in front of him. He knew this hill, had driven past it a dozen times in the month of war games before the battle. He’d never imagined things would go so badly in the battle that he’d actually have it at his back. This was Hill 260.8, named like every other piece of high ground on the military maps for its metric height above sea level. Hill 260.8 had a commanding view of the approaching steppe. It was the final natural defense before Oboyan. To make sure the Germans and Russians met right here, the Oboyan road cut the hill in half.

Six kilometers to the north was the village of Novoselovka. Twenty kilometers beyond that was Oboyan and a straight course into Kursk. Hill 260.8 was in the center of the Red Army’s third and final major defensive belt on the southern front. It was their last stand.

Dimitri kept himself apart from Pasha and Sasha. He bummed a cigarette and a light from a passing soldier, noting the man was with the 3011th Rifle Division. So it was their positions that his torn-up battalion had escaped to in the night. Five thousand foot soldiers dug more holes for themselves a kilometer in each direction across the road, like prairie creatures. The young soldier struck a match for Dimitri and cupped the flame. Dimitri leaned his mouth into the man’s hands. His fingers and nails were clean, his hands did not tremble. He was fresh, still unbludgeoned by the Germans. The man stood while Dimitri inhaled the tobacco, waiting for some word, something brotherly between fighting men. But he was not dirty enough. Dimitri turned his gaze south, across the plain where the Germans would follow in a few more hours, and could not describe for this clean soldier what was going to happen. You’re going to die, Dimitri thought, sucking the cigarette, and walked away as if the man were already a corpse and beyond thanking.

Dimitri smoked while Pasha and Sasha hefted shells into the General’s bins. He let the rising sun warm his face and unbuttoned his coveralls at the chest. He smoked the cigarette down to where he kissed his fingertips to get the last of it. On every side, men labored, vehicles churned, weapons were loaded, but he did not lift a hand. He stood tilting his face into the light. It calmed him to do nothing while many thousands around him worked, it felt like power.

A commissar bustled down the line of tanks, handing out paper sheets. He thrust one at Dimitri with a scowl, then moved on. The paper bore a one-sentence message: ‘The Germans must not break through to Oboyan, at all costs.’ It was sent by General Vatutin, commander of the Voronezh Front, and Nikita Khrushchev, political chief. Dimitri let the page flutter to the ground. He closed his eyes and returned his face to the warm and waiting sky. Yes, he thought. At all costs, of course. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

‘Pick that up.’

Dimitri opened his eyes into his own youthful face glaring at him.

Valentin said again, ‘Pick that up.’

In Valya’s hand, Dimitri saw the same page sent from the general and the apparatchik. He bent and plucked his own sheet from the dirt, as ordered. Valentin stared at him. The boy creased his own page neatly and slipped it into his breast pocket over his heart. Dimitri crinkled the paper in his fist and crammed it in his pocket.

‘Do you have any work to do?’

The boy’s skin was smirched below a white mask around the eyes where his goggles had been. Valya was a better fighter than most, and for that Dimitri was proud of him. But Dimitri was so tired, standing in front of his Communist son, he was frazzled by his black mood and the prospect of another day’s battle. The boy had walked over just to take what small shred of power Dimitri was gleaning from this morning, pretending to be a hetman while others did their chores and he merely watched, an elder, a personage. This is what the Communists do, he thought. They make everyone equal by seeing that everyone obeys. That’s not freedom.

Sometimes freedom is to throw the fucking paper on the ground and leave it there. Valya was waiting for an answer. Dimitri looked at his boy and felt himself sinking into Valentin’s equality, where he had no more temper, no miserable mood to call his own, no warm sky to pause under, he was not a hetman. It seemed he’d been fighting everything and everyone, across every tick of the damn clock for years. The tank, the Germans, his fear, his exhaustion - and the one fight he wanted, the one for his son’s soul, he could not take the battlefield, because his son would not call him Papa.

He was so tired.

Dimitri swayed on his feet. What was this? The rider in his heart had gone shaky in the stirrups. The Cossack was about to tumble from the saddle.

Dimitri raised a hand to find steadiness. Valya did not move. So Dimitri caught himself.

And he laughed, a reflex that welled out of him.

‘You’re right,’ he said to his son, chuckling and free again. ‘I have plenty to do.’

Dimitri turned his back on Valya. He went to his toolbox and selected a wrench. He opened the General’s transmission compartment and leaned in to lay his palms on the cool machinery. He tapped the wrench against metal, imitating the sounds of working. After he’d gotten enough grease on his hands to appear that he’d been busy, he lowered the door and tightened it again. He looked around for Valentin and did not find him. He smeared a little oil on his face to add to the film that had grown on him in the past several days. Another soldier hurried by smoking; Dimitri hooked a cigarette from him. He sucked a deep breath, the smoke flooded his blood with a lie of well-being. The soldier jogged off. Dimitri stood in the vast morning, 0700 hours on his watch. He gazed up Hill 260.8, this day the most strategic spot in all of Russia, to be defended at all costs. Dimitri was ready for that, to lay down his life on this road to help trip the Germans walking over it. On every side of him were trenches and earthworks teeming with armed men and boys, manning guns large and small, guns rooted and guns on the move. Around them was the coming battle; on all sides of the battle was the war; and beyond the war was the world and the shape it would take, on and on it spun, into history and eternity and oblivion. It all pivoted around him, Dimitri and his cigarette. This was what Valentin couldn’t take from him, what the Communists could not dominate. This. His spirit. He took one more draft of the cigarette, raised both hands above his shoulders in welcome, and blew a cloud of smoke at the German Stuka fighters droning in high over the steppe from the south. Here they come, he thought. He made a fist and thumped his chest. Sirens sounded. Men ran to their stations, tanks cranked their engines, anti-aircraft batteries pounded from the hill behind him. Dimitri stood alone in the swirl of it all. He thought, before joining the battle, that he had never been lonelier, or sadder, than this.

One by one the gull-wing Stukas broke formation and dove. Their engines railed at the speed they gathered, their wings whistled, and they re-formed into a black knife’s edge in the sky, a scythe sweeping down at Dimitri. Sasha and Pasha ran past. Pasha vaulted onto the General and disappeared into his hatch like a rabbit into its hutch. Sasha stopped in front of Dimitri, the whine of the fighter bombers climbing. Dimitri did not bring his face down from the sky or lower his arms until Sasha kicked him in the shin.

‘Dima!’ the boy shouted. His face glowed red under the grime. ‘Drive!’

Dima watched the world turning and not the event in front of him. He lowered his hands. He took the cigarette off his lips and tossed it aside.

The diving German planes screeched from a long way off. They were coming, but there was time. Where was Valya? Ah, there, running up, so young and beautiful, he comes fast, too, like the Germans. Dimitri licked the tobacco taste on his lips. Drive? Alright.

Sasha leaped onto the tank and slipped down the hatch. Dimitri found himself sliding into his seat and firing up the engine before Valentin had tumbled in and began shouting orders, even before all their headsets were tugged on. The General shot forward. Dimitri’s hands took the steering levers in a strong grip. Oddly, his weakness and exhaustion had vanished.

Sasha tilted his machine-gun up toward the onrushing Stukas and let loose an entire belt of ammunition. Dimitri drove straight at the diving planes. He knew their tactic: Make the Russian tanks veer away, then fire their 30 mm cannons into the thinly armored rear engine compartments. Valya’s boots on his shoulders did nothing to pull him away from his headlong charge into the German guns. Dimitri watched them come through his open hatch door.

Their shrieking dives were lost under the clank of his tank. The planes split out of their tight black blade, choosing targets. One pilot singled Dimitri out.

Twin flashes stuttered under the Junker’s wings. Sasha answered the blast with his own, punier machine-gun. Good for you, Dimitri thought. Talk back to him, Sasha. Black flak bursts spat in the air around the German. Dimitri eyed the ground for the fountains of dirt plowed up by the Stuka’s glittering guns. There, to the right, like a seam bursting in the earth. Valya’s boot almost kicked Dimitri down out of his seat, shoving him left, left! Dimitri threw the right lever, hauled back on the left and in an instant shifted into the next gear, the General tipped up onto the port tread but crashed back down and dashed out of the row of the bullets. The Stuka pulled up from his dive and Dimitri heard it, an angry bitch of a wail, he thought, and suddenly, under the black bent wings of the fighter-bomber streaking past, he awoke from his slow-motion world to the sweat-dripping fearful peril that he and his son and his crew were in.

Dimitri kept the General lunging in crazy patterns. Valya did not guide him; how could he? There was no path to follow from the diving rampage of the Stukas. Everywhere Dimitri turned, another T-34 erupted in flames, flinging pieces from the bombs and guns at them out of the morning. The Stukas dove and pecked at the scattering tanks like gulls on the beach, high-pitched voices squalling, and Dimitri could do nothing but run circles, squiggles, any maneuver to thwart the onslaught. The tanks were the targets for the Stukas, they ignored for now the dug-in Red infantry and the massed artillery on Hill 260.8. This told Dimitri that German tanks were headed their way in the next wave.

The General’s intercom was silent. No one uttered anything for the minutes Dimitri skirted the cratering ground, no one of them cheered him on, racing out of the Stukas’ guns. Dimitri had the only upward view through his raised hatch; the sky was a rumpled quilt of smoke and darting wings.

The rattling bang of the Stukas’ machine-guns melded with the roar of their engines and the noises Dimitri wrung from the General’s motor. The battlefield was insane. A row of bullets marched right up the glacis plate and across the turret, like a dozen hammers and chisels, bits of the General were chewed off but the armor held. Beside Dimitri, Sasha swiveled his machine-gun with a fury, looking for something to shoot at.

Dimitri guessed there were sixty Stukas in the air. The Germans wanted Hill 260.8 bad, they wanted to bust open the Oboyan road, some urgency drove them this morning even harder than in the past four days of combat.

These planes were but the leading edge of a battering ram. Dimitri sensed it, the desperation of the Germans. They’re running out of time. We need to live a little longer, he thought to his son and his crew, his tank and his army under the onslaught around him.

Dimitri swerved right. He took his hands from the levers and pushed up his sleeves. He’d drenched himself with sweat, his goggles ran with dribbles and he tore them off. There was no fatigue or pain, they would have been luxuries. A roar filled the swaying compartment. Everyone heard it, Sasha looked up from his machine-gun into the low green roof of his metal place. A Stuka had angled in right above them, diving fast, shrieking in its speed, plummeting at them from behind. Dimitri flung the levers to pivot. He did not pray; that, too, would have been a luxury. The General was going as fast as it could, faster than anyone in the company could drive over this terrain. The screaming engine peaked, the bullets and bombs would come now. A blast hit the ground ten meters to Dimitri’s right, the General shook with the impact. Dimitri tensed, knowing the bomb blast was close enough to kill him. But the thing that hit the ground was not a bomb but the Stuka itself, shot out of the sky and pranged into the earth right beside the General. The whomp of the plane rattled through Dimitri’s spinning treads. He cracked the silence in the intercom, he shouted or laughed, he didn’t know which but he had gone a bit crazy himself fleeing from the Stukas, wondering where the Red fighter planes were in their defense. He mashed the accelerator and flew past the splintered and smoking fuselage. Another set of wings soared over his head, red stars emblazoned on their bottoms. A silver Sturmovik did a barrel roll twenty meters off the ground, leaving a twist of smoke in his wake. Valentin ballyhooed, too, into the ears of the crew, everyone in the tank balled a fist and rattled it. Dimitri glanced over to Sasha, the machine-gunner smiled hugely. He’d been crying. Dimitri punched the boy in the shoulder.

‘Not dead yet!’ he shouted. ‘Eh, Sasha, my boy?’

Sasha wiped a hand over his dirty scarlet cheeks.

What Dimitri saw across the plain below Hill 260.8 throttled his heart.

Tanks. A hundred of them, in a line as far east and west as he could see to the limits of his open hatch, tanks like a poisoned vein, venom in the earth.

They had to stretch from Verkhopenye to Sokho-Solotino, a ten-kilometer swath on either side of the Oboyan road, with Dimitri smack in the middle.

The Stukas overhead now had the Sturmoviks to contend with. The ground attack was the real hammer blow of the German battering ram to snatch the road. This was tank against tank.

Valya’s boot touched his neck. Stop. Dimitri downshifted and dug the tank in. Without the clatter of the treads to obscure it he heard the deepness of the day’s battle, the booms and lashes of artillery and cannons, the pops of small-arms fire, the rip of airplane engines and guns overhead, and tanks dashing past, forming up into their units to confront the German battle group rumbling and smoking, kicking dust and closing across the grassland from the south. Dimitri waited while Valya waved flags to his ragtag platoon. Another plane crashed down, evicted out of the melee in the air. Beside Dimitri, Sasha fingered his trigger. On the cusp of standing on the fuel pedal and plunging ahead, Dimitri rummaged inside himself, for sorrow, or humility, or regret at how he’d handled his life, something benevolent to please God with what might turn out to be his last worldly thoughts, but he found none of it, nothing good to drape about him before facing today’s certain death. He stared straight ahead into the plain and turned up nothing but the exhilaration of war. I tried, he told himself, and told God, too, should God be listening, and took the levers.

Valya clanged shut his hatch. The General idled on the steppe, other tanks moved beside it. The Germans weren’t near enough yet to trade shots. Dimitri thought, Why wait? Valentin read his mind and toed the top of Dimitri’s head.

Go.

* * * *

July

at the foot of Hill 260.8

0750 hours

the Oboyan road

Dimitri descended into the battle. It took its shape around him, like a current flowing past a prow. The immense noise and shuddering vibrations faded to a fizz in his ears. His feet on the pedals and his fists on the levers ruddered the tank through the flow of fires and howl. Pasha and Sasha faded, too, they moved like dipping oars, propelling the General into the waves of combat. Dimitri did not notice the ruin and din the way a sailor does not focus on the water, his eye is to the wind that drives him. Valya was that wind. The boy issued orders with voice and tapping feet, he lit up the morning with bonfires that were enemies, he started and halted the tank, rocked it with the cannon and recoil, every move was commanded by him.

Valentin fought the battle, and Dimitri fought only the tank. There was peace in this, peace in the midst of horror. Dimitri left his hatch door open, to see as much of the field as he could. He exposed himself to exploding shrapnel, to a million zinging bullets, but there was nothing left to him in the world, he had no clan, he was no one’s hetman. The day was enormous, bigger and more tumultuous than anything he’d ever experienced.

The German tanks rolled over the advance trenches of the third and final defense belt etched across the Oboyan road. The Red soldiers of the 3051th Rifle Division held their ground against the charge of metal but by 1000 hours the tanks sliced through them and the German grenadiers followed, falling into the defense works, cauterizing them in close-quarters fighting. Dimitri saw the blasts of grenades, bodies flung on the black concussions; arms rose and fell with bayonets and trenching tools. German bravery poured itself over Russian bravery and together they boiled in the pits dug by Just Sonya and her thousand civilians. The unsheathed men of both armies mangled one another. The German tanks rumbled past their skirmish, spraying defenders with machine-gun fire and point-blank cannon until they had punched through the defense line. In a clanking, jagged line, buttoned tight and spewing shells and smoke, they treaded up the elevated ground that lay before Hill 260.8 and the Oboyan road and Dimitri.

The field that separated the T-34s from the German tanks was five kilometers deep and fifteen kilometers wide. The land was even and colored by smashed grasses, with no trees or streams to break the table.

The slope up to Dimitri’s position was gentle and his view of the enemy tanks was unhindered, despite the battle haze, the fumes and spittle of fighting and dying machines. A medley of German tanks clattered forward.

Dimitri spotted mostly boxy Mark IVs coming in wedge formations. A handful of feeble Mark IIIs bounced over the ruts like runt schoolkids desperate to keep up. He swept his gaze over the German advance, no fewer than fifty tanks spread before him. He wondered how many he did not see. The leviathans in their pack could not be hidden. Tigers.

‘AP!’ hollered Valya. Pasha slammed a shell into the breech. The General’s interior stank with sulphur backwash. A boot on Dimitri’s cap brought the tank to a halt. The turret whined to the right. Dimitri sat on the shuddering idle, downshifting to first, keeping the clutch depressed, his hands on the levers to leap ahead the instant the shell was gone. Valentin toed the firing pedal and the General shook. Without an order, Dimitri bolted ahead, going nowhere, but moving: A still tank on a battlefield is a fatal thing.

The roiled ground fountained in the cannon blast, Valentin did not ask Dimitri to wait until he could confirm a hit through the dust and grass, they just kept moving.

The Germans stayed back, they came no closer than a thousand meters. Some tank from either side would bolt ahead into the seven-, even six-hundred-meter range, not careful where his comrades were. He’d get off a shot or two and more often than not die right there, becoming a sort of fiery pylon demarking the ravaged boundaries between the forces. Valentin lost control of his tank squadron early, this was a free-for-all. He picked solitary targets across the distance of the field, using the small advantage of the elevation provided by the landscape, and was in turn picked by enemies. He shouted every order to Pasha, and only spoke to Dimitri when he had the turret rotated far enough to pull his feet from his father’s shoulders. Sasha fired at streaking Stukas when he could, but as yet there were no German infantry in range. The duels were impromptu across the field, gunner against gunner. This was tank battle in open land.

Dimitri ran wicked patterns across the field. He ducked in and out of the other T-34s, getting Valya the best flank shots he could while making himself hard to hit. He even went so far as to speed behind other idling Red tanks who were sitting still for moments to finalize their own targets, to scrape off the attention of any German commander who might be following the General in his periscope. Twice the General was struck, both glancing shots off the sloped armor that did not explode but struck like a bell clapper, dulling every ear inside for a minute. The crew stayed alive because Valentin was remarkably fast with his marksmanship, Pasha showed the determination of a machine, and Dimitri flogged the tank in and out of gears with the hands of a tillerman and a hard rider, lurching and careering, reversing just to be random and maddening.

He spun through a field increasingly clotted with burning T-34s.

Twenty or more tanks smoldered in varying stages of destruction, some wrecked and dismembered, some aflame and whole, some silent and still.

The toll of the battle was swinging away from him. Red soldiers trotted past, retreating north up the road and Hill 260.8, some without weapons, running from the beating they’d taken in their forward trenches. Two thousand black jots appeared around the arrays of German tanks, their panzergrenadiers advancing alongside their armor, the classic Blitzkrieg tactic, unbeatable.

The first tier of the final Soviet defense line before Oboyan had been breached. German tanks began to roll in front of their smoking dead comrades, the battlefield gobbled a hundred, two hundred meters more of the Oboyan road. Now the distance between the two tank armies was lessened. Valentin’s shots came faster, the enemy was larger in his sights.

Dimitri rambled through a thinning Russian force, the Germans came up the long grade like a tide, sweeping into the trenches, bubbling over the sandcastle redoubts of Russia that would not hold them back.

Dimitri parked between two immobile T-34s, one raging on fire, the other mute and whole. Sasha and Pasha went out the hatches at Valentin’s command to scavenge ammunition from the quiet tank. Sasha slithered out his escape hatch below his feet with a red stouthearted face, eager to do something besides shoot at airplanes he could never hit. Valentin heaved empty shell casings out his open hatch. Dimitri eased his hands, hoping the shroud of greasy vapor from the burning tank would hide the General’s life from the closing Germans. He lowered his goggles over his eyes against the smoke wafting in his hatch, and breathed into his sleeve to filter the smoke. Pasha and Sasha ferried shells in to Valentin, who shoved them into the racks. The flames from the tank beside Dimitri murmured and lapped. He looked out his hatch at the Germans teeming around the Oboyan road. The ranks of the Mark IVs and Mark IIIs crept closer, they were within five hundred meters now. Infantry ran hunched behind and beside them. A company of sappers crept ahead, watching for mines, dangerous work. He stared into the gaps in the swirling pall and knew the Oboyan road was about to be lost. The German formations came like spears. Then, while he watched, the tips of the wedges seemed to open, the lead tanks pulled aside. Out from their shield, moving to the point of the advance, rolled six Tigers. All six of the giants fired at once. The boom pushed aside every other noise of the battle, six smoke rings stupefied Dimitri in the split second before the rounds landed.

The barrage struck other targets, the ruse of the smoke had worked.

The .88s of the Tigers raised plumes in the dirt that sent Sasha and Pasha tumbling and squirming back into the General, hatch doors were screwed shut fast. Valentin’s voice cut through the scrambling in a bellow. ‘Go, go, go!’

Dimitri reacted by instinct, cutting loose the tank, shifting gears, pistoning his feet. But he did not pivot back up the hill to join the retreat.

Instead, he wheeled the General at the Germans.

For a moment Valya gave no reaction. Dimitri gunned into second gear and did not veer. Valentin’s boot tapped on Dimitri’s right shoulder.

Turn, the boot asked. Dimitri did not yield, driving at the heart of an enemy wedge, into the smoking center where a Tiger towered. The boot nudged again, like a kind angel on his shoulder beseeching him to come around and flee, to live and bear these others in the tank with him away to live.

Why? he asked, and in answer the center of the wedge four hundred meters away smoked again, a shell on a flat trajectory shrieked past and exploded somewhere behind. Sasha beside him leaned into his machine-gun and his vision block, firing and spinning the barrel at targets, they were close enough now to the German sappers for the boy to pitch in, and Dimitri thought, Good for you, Sasha. He was sorry to carry the two youngsters with him into the blackness he foresaw in his and his son’s futures, where there was no clan, where the Germans took the road today and Russia lost the battle for Kursk maybe tomorrow and finally the war, so there would be no more freedom. That would be a dead life, a conquered life. Sasha and Pasha won’t want that life, either. The battle mists sucked him forward, Dimitri shifted gears again. He didn’t decide this, to die today.

But the leaflet had said ‘at all costs.’ What was he, Dimitri Berko, to not be spent on the Oboyan road? He knew he was nothing worth preserving.

The General bounded over the field past charring hulks, into a range where there were no other living Red tanks but his. He waited for his son’s boots on his shoulders, for his earphones to split with a screamed command to turn and join the retreat. But behind him Pasha rammed one more of the rescued rounds into the breech. Sasha sprayed the machine-gun, and Valentin acquired a target.

Alright, Dimitri thought. He was so tired, and this felt good, to be almost finished.

He reached up and lowered his armored hatch door, cutting down his vision of the battlefield to nothing but the rectangular slice glowing inside his vision block. He gave the T-34 over to Valentin this way, completely, and gave himself away, too.

Now the tank was enclosed around the four of them. The close green walls shook, the treads ground and squeaked, the diesel engine blared.

Sasha exhausted one ammo belt and plucked another off the wall, slapping it into his breech. He laid on the trigger, brrrap, brrrap! Dimitri felt virtuous that he’d brought the red quiet child to this place where he was a man and hero. Pasha behind him, too, with a shell in his lap, sleeves rolled up, dirty and streaked, a warrior. Valentin’s boots on his shoulders were gentle, patting pressure left and right instead of pounding with insistence or panic or anger.

Both boot soles pressed beside Dimitri’s neck. At the signal he skidded to a halt. Sasha swayed at the failing momentum but kept firing his machine-gun, baring his teeth at what he watched himself do through his periscope. One of Valya’s feet left Dimitri’s shoulder for the firing pedal.

There were plenty of targets, tanks everywhere three hundred meters away.

Valentin wasted no time picking an enemy and letting fly. Within seconds the inside of the General was packed with the chattering machine-gun and the cannon, the reek of sulphur, the recoil and hot spitting of the spent casing, then the winding engine and Dimitri’s flailing arms weaving the General back and forth, wending snake-patterns into the path of the German advance. They were hectic moving toward their finish, all four doing their jobs, focused on their purposes, to finish well. How many shells did they have left? Dimitri wondered. They’d picked up an extra dozen, maybe they had twenty on board, five more machine-gun belts - it didn’t matter, there wasn’t enough, whatever the number. Dimitri drew the General closer to the advancing Germans.

He drove the tank into a crater, he hadn’t seen it coming. The chassis dipped. Dimitri’s head snapped forward. He downshifted to power out of the hole.

The intercom crackled.

‘Stay here.’

Dimitri halted the tank.

‘Back up.’

Dimitri reversed into the crater and eased the General’s hull below ground level. Only the turret was exposed now to the sights of the German armor.

‘HEAT,’ Valya called to Pasha. The boy laid aside the AP shell he’d cradled and dug up another. Valya lowered the long main gun. At this distance a high-explosive shell would penetrate a Mark IV’s frontal armor and turn it into an oven.

Dimitri saw nothing but the scorched dirt wall of the crater in front of him. Valentin goosed the turret left and fired. The scalding casing flopped on the rubber mat, hissing. Pasha fed the breech and swept the casing aside. Dimitri turned in his seat to watch his son. The boy’s face was smashed against his range finder, his hands played the traverse and elevation controls. The tank seemed to bend itself around him, gauges and handles, switches and eyepieces. He was a Communist, a drone, and this Soviet tank was made for him, for the peasants and the fighting believers.

Dimitri had done his son a huge kindness bringing him here to the brink, where he could lay down his life for Lenin and Stalin, those purgatives of the human spirit. No one would forget Valentin Berko after today, the Cossack sergeant who charged straight into the German maw while the rest of the Red force withdrew up the hill. Pasha and Sasha, they didn’t know they were going to die. They would be forgotten.

The cannon fired again. The General shied from the crater wall, then settled again.

Dimitri looked at Sasha. The boy had no one to shoot at, Dimitri nowhere to drive.

‘You know, it’s a beautiful morning out there.’

The boy blinked, confused. He’d been ejected from the battle with his finger still on the trigger, he licked his lips for more blood to spill.

Dimitri reached for the lever to his hatch cover and gave it a twist.

‘Let’s go have a look.’

He shoved open the hatch and stood. The blue sky was immense and patient. With sore hands Dimitri boosted himself onto the glacis plate, then walked along the General’s fender to squat on his haunches behind the turret. Sasha appeared at the rear of the idling tank. Dimitri lent a hand to lift him onto the engine deck, and together they peered at the battleground.

Valentin and Pasha fired. The long cannon swiveled, paused, and fired again. The tank jumped with the reports, but no more than a horse over a hedge and Dimitri sat on his heels, balanced, while Sasha held on.

The turret rested for long moments, listless smoke trailed out of the big gun. Then the fat round turret whirred and rotated far to the right, away from the dozen or so enemy tanks and thousand grenadiers bearing straight down on the General’s crater. This close to the leading edge of the German advance, Valentin chose for his last precious rounds to target a Tiger four hundred meters to the left. The giant was at the head of a wedge, broadside. It rumbled slowly across the field, inexorable and unwitting, vulnerable.

Dimitri waited beside Sasha for Valya and Pasha to strike. The seconds of the morning had no ticking clock to pace them; instead there was the whine and rolling creak of steel, the thrum of cannon blasts from the broad German advance in front, and from behind on the Russian-held hill and the Oboyan road. Above, planes slashed in crisscross duels with fantastic, straining motors. Sasha and Dimitri were the only still and silent things of the battlefield, except the dead. The boy’s eyes darted, nervous and aroused. He knew now.

Valentin took his time targeting the Tiger. The monster was moving and Valya had to give the proper lead. Dimitri slid across the T-34’s deck to sit beside Sasha. He wrapped his arm about the boy’s shoulders. Sasha trembled as if he were cold. Dimitri kissed the boy on a fuzzy cheek. He turned his head to the Tiger. Sasha’s thin arm nestled around Dimitri’s waist, and his head turned, too.

The General’s gun crept to the right, stopped, and fired. The roar was splendid. A corona of blasted air and dust swept up from the steppe, then returned to it tumbling. The Tiger smoked. Valya scored a direct hit on the massive tread. The Tiger jerked as though tripped and did not move.

Behind it, the wedge of armor slowed and halted, unsure. Valentin fired again, splurging his waning ammunition on the Tiger, to make certain the thing was killed. The big tank disappeared in a ragged globe of fire.

The German wedge was motionless. Valentin and Pasha went into a frenzy. The General’s cannon erupted six times in under two minutes, each shell pummeling the weaker side armor of the several Mark IVs accompanying the ignited Tiger. Dimitri and Sasha thrilled and gripped each other with each report. Sasha began to cheer. Valya had torn a hole in the German assault. Dimitri looked across the battlefield and was surprised to see the entire German advance paused to consider this little, lone T-34

dug into a crater smacking them on the nose. Dimitri thought, Keep it up, Valya! Hammer them good!

But the cannon did not fire again. The turret did not pivot for another target. The ammunition was gone.

The air keened in Dimitri’s ears. In the fraction of a second left to him, he cut his gaze straight ahead, to a Tiger 250 meters away. He stared straight down the muzzle of the gigantic, smoking barrel.

The lip of the crater erupted. He was blown off the tank, Sasha was ripped from his arm. He landed beside the General’s port tread; dirt showered on him. His head pounded and his goggles were gone. All the buttons on his coveralls were missing, the pockets and chest flapped open.

He staggered to his knees.

He scrabbled on all fours around the links of the General’s tracks.

Haze wafted off the glacis plate. The .88 shell had pierced the crater berm and struck the frontal armor of the T-34. Dimitri had no way to know if the plating had held, if Valentin and Pasha were dead.

Sasha lay on his back on the other side of the tank. Dimitri skidded to him. The boy was unconscious, his goggles were cracked. A gash drooled blood down his brow. Dimitri lifted the boy’s head into his lap. The sky sizzled, another shell coming in. Dimitri clutched Sasha to his bare chest.

He would die after all with a son in his arms.

He looked up. No explosion hit the General. The round he’d heard wasn’t coming in. It was going out.

Beyond the rim, the sounds of artillery mounted. Shells whooshed over his head, ripping down from Hill 260.8. Thunder in the earth shook under his seat in the crater. Sasha’s head wound dribbled into his thigh. His face to the sky, Dimitri tried to catch silver glimpses of the sibilant shells flashing past. The rounds tore in twos and threes, a Russian barrage concentrated to save the brave crew of the General Platov.

Three Sturmoviks broke their engagements in the mansion of sky and streaked down, trailing vapor, wings sparking cannon fire and smoke. They dove in low over the crater - zoom! one, two, three -Dimitri listened to them attack and bank out. The Soviet fighters circled to come around again. More artillery poured down from the hill. Sasha stirred. Dimitri pinched shut the gash in Sasha’s forehead, the bleeding eased between his grubby fingers.

He sat like this, marveling at the furor around him; the clash between armies right now was fought not for control of the Oboyan road, not for anything historic at all, but roared and erupted just for him and these boys he’d brought out here. This was majestic. Sasha needed to wake to see it.

Dimitri squeezed the boy’s earlobe.

Sasha sputtered and sat up. Dimitri took away his hand from the boy’s head, blood seeped from the cut. Sasha drew a sharp breath and set loose wild eyes, he’d awakened expecting to be dead. Dimitri patted the boy’s leg.

‘Are you alright?’

Sasha blinked. ‘What happened?’

‘You keep trying to get yourself killed. You’re not very good at it.’

The boy touched the blood trail warming his temple. He looked at his fingertips. Dimitri pressed back a black chuckle in his breast, he did not say to the boy that they would probably both get it right before the morning was out.

The commander’s hatch lifted open. Valentin stood in the turret. He saw the two of them sitting beside the treads.

Valentin said nothing.

Behind and above Valya, more artillery shells rent invisible stripes through the air. Dimitri heard the rounds whispering over his son’s shoulder, a moment later blasting into the German advance. The three Red fighter planes tilted behind him, hung on the blue like ornaments. Valentin was a hero this minute, the hero of the Oboyan road. The exploding tableau around him would be painted as the backdrop to his portrait one day.

Dimitri stood from Sasha, trailing a hand over the boy’s shoulder before he stepped away. Sasha sat still. Dimitri swung up onto the T-34’s deck. He rose to his full height beside the turret looking over the crater’s lip.

A wall of eruptions barred the Germans from coming any closer. Round after round detonated in their ranks; the rest of the enemy advance on all sides was being ignored by every gunner on Hill 260.8 and in the remaining defense bunkers along the road and by the three Soviet fighter planes who’d taken up the mission to save the gallant little T-34 that had knocked out six German tanks single-handedly, including a Tiger. The German wedge closest to the crater recoiled under the concerted Russian salvos, their tanks and infantry temporarily stymied.

Everything on the battlefield Dimitri had in his heart. Confusion, reprieve, bedlam. There would be more, Dimitri decided, standing beside his son on the brink. There would be more.

* * * *

CHAPTER 17

July 9

1005 hours

the village of Kriulkovo

Outside the barn, the day promised to be hot. Thin tiers of light grinned in the space between the weathered wood slats. Inside the barn, the air stayed cool, there was room for the heat in the bare rafters. Daniel and Ivan lay on piles of straw, chewing pieces of it. To Katya they looked like lazy farmhands hiding from work.

The three of them were hiding. Plokhoi’s cell had dispersed for the day into this farming village ten kilometers north of Borisovka. The older men of the cell worked in the fields this morning helping villagers with their hoeing. Plokhoi himself dug potatoes and beans. The younger ones, the ones who could be spotted by roving German patrols as not belonging in civilian clothes, stayed out of sight. Plokhoi let Katya rest after her scare beside the railroad tracks. She’d been given a minute in the river, a change of clothes, and another horse.

She leaned over the rail of the stall where her new mount stood. She caressed the ear of the horse. The ear twitched under her fingers. Katya rose on tiptoe and blew into it. She whispered into the pink folds.

‘Your name now is Svetlana. That was my mother’s name. I will call you Lana.’

The horse shook its head away from her hand. Katya kept her lips close to the horse’s ear, whispering.

‘Don’t be like that, Lana.’

‘Leave the poor animal alone, Witch,’ Daniel called from his mound.

‘It’s understandable if she doesn’t like you.’

From his straw pile, Ivan laughed. The sight of Katya covered in Anna’s gore had lost its grimness and become something to joke with her about. She had risked the mission, but then saved it. She had earned some ribbing from the partisans, and some respect.

‘Ignore them, Lanyushka,’ she told the horse. ‘Did you know your predecessor was a very brave horse?’ Katya recalled drawing her knife under Anna’s throat, how terrified Anna had been after the C-3 gutted her, how she’d tried to stand and run. Katya resolved to remember Anna always as brave. That was all she could do, all anyone could do for a comrade’s death.

Lana tossed her head out of Katya’s hands. Katya reached to pat the receding mane and the horse dodged her.

Ivan laughed. ‘You’re losing your touch, Cossack.’

‘Too many airplanes,’ added Daniel.

‘Did you see what she did to her plane?’ Ivan rolled over on his straw.

‘Planes probably don’t like her anymore, either.’

The two soldiers guffawed. Katya glared at them without mirth. Left in that airplane was Vera, also brave and sacrificed by Katya. The two men did not catch the look on her face as they chuckled to themselves. Katya stepped toward Ivan, the bigger one, to kick him in the ribs.

The barn door creaked open.

A German soldier stepped inside.

Ivan and Daniel rolled off their backs, scrambling for their rifles and to get to their feet. Katya stood in the middle of the barn floor with nowhere to run, no weapon at hand. She went rigid, afraid and certain that guns were about to blaze.

A partisan stepped out of the sun behind the German. The enemy soldier stared down the long barrels pointed at him by Daniel and Ivan. The partisan gave the man a shove in the back. The German stumbled into the barn. Katya saw his hands were tied.

‘We got this one out of a downed bomber last night,’ the partisan announced. ‘Plokhoi said to keep him out of sight in here.’

Katya did not know this partisan, bearded and deep-eyed, another product of privation and anger. He was new to Colonel Bad’s collection of aging peasant fighters.

Ivan set down his rifle and dug into his pack. Daniel was slower to lower his gun. Ivan took out a coil of rope. The old partisan nodded when he saw big Ivan moving to take control of the prisoner. The old man pocketed the pistol he’d kept in the German’s back and slipped out the barn door. He dissolved into the summer light and closed the door behind him.

Ivan approached the prisoner, towering over him. The German was short and lean, with close-cropped hair. He was a high officer, that was clear by his filthy uniform. That was why he was brought in as a prisoner instead of shot on sight. Plokhoi will want this officer interrogated. The German looked up at Ivan. The expression on his face was not fear or disdain. He seemed to want to cooperate. Ivan pointed to the barn floor at the foot of a support column. The prisoner sat. Ivan lapped the rope around the man’s chest and waist and knotted him in.

Katy a came close. The prisoner watched Ivan tying him down, then gazed up at Katya. He blinked and gave a weary smile. His face was grimy across the brow and cheeks, he’d been wearing goggles. His uniform was dirty, too, and tailored. On his left breast hung a medal, a swastika emblem inside a German cross, resting on two crossed swords. On his right collar tab were twin lightning bolts. The man was SS.

Ivan finished and went back to his pile of straw. Daniel was already on his back again, chewing another strand. Katya glared at the prisoner. SS, she thought. The worst. The most dangerous. He’s small, he doesn’t look like much. Neither do snakes.

The prisoner did not pull his eyes from hers. He was captured, he was hated. She thought he should hang his head.

‘ Bitte,’ he said. His voice was low enough for only her to hear.

Katya was dumbfounded, she could not believe he would speak. She felt affronted by his voice. Who, where does he think he is? He’s a prisoner. He’s going to Siberia or a firing squad when the interrogators are done with him. She wanted to exact a vengeance on this SS officer right now, to kick him and beat him for Vera, Leonid, all her dead pilots and friends, dead Russians, her family at war, burned villages, the entire damned war, beat him for it until she fell.

‘ Bitte,’ he whispered again. He looked down at his ropes, then back up to her and said, ‘ Du tnusst mich geben lassen.’ Katya guessed it was about the fact that he was tied up. She gawped at his face, amazed. The man was certain, quietly, even pleasantly so, that she should take the ropes off him.

She drove forward and sent her boot into his rib cage. The German’s filthy face puckered at the blow. She stepped back and watched the pain work in him. She’d kick him again if he opened his mouth.

He nodded at her. Alright, he said with the gesture. He hung his head as she wanted.

* * * *

July 9

1340 hours

The German officer said nothing for the hours he sat tied to the beam.

Katy a had never been this close to a German before. She’d always flown over their heads in the night, catching glimpses only in firelight and bomb flash. The only others had been the two guards next to the rail tracks, but Katya’s eyes were shut, playing dead. This German tied to the post was no foot soldier. He was a ranking SS officer, with a silver medal and high boots. She watched him from beside Lana’s stall, she was letting her new horse get used to her smell. The prisoner had an unusual quality, how motionless he could sit. He seemed focused on being still; after Katya kicked him he’d taken the message to heart. He didn’t shift a finger of his bound hands, never raised his head. She studied him and imagined the worst of what this man likely had done. Executions, atrocities, the number of Russians he’d killed in battle.

Across the barn Daniel yawned, Ivan snored. Katya took a swallow from her canteen. She wanted to see if the German would react, ask for water. To tempt him, she offered water to her horse. Lana dropped her reluctance and Katya poured water over Lana’s loud lapping tongue, wasting much of it. She spoke gently to the horse, to show the German she was human and tender, to remind him that he had killed Russian women and men just like her, good people who loved animals, who did not want this war but he had brought it here. She wanted to make the prisoner ashamed.

Katya strode in front of the German. She tilted the canteen’s mouth and dribbled water in the dirt beside him. Look up at me, she thought.

He lifted his eyes. His jaw was set, ready for another kick.

Katya moved the falling dribble over his chest, to make him lean forward and lick it out of the air, like her horse, like an animal. He drank with greed and without meeting her eyes.

The barn door creaked open. She stepped away from the German.

His tunic was wet. Under her gaze he retreated to his stillness.

Colonel Plokhoi came out of the blinding day. Behind him walked the starosta Filip.

Both men were sweaty and soiled. Both wore their wool coats and dark hats. Katya admired the will of these old men, to work in this heat wearing such clothes. She knew it was Plokhoi’s command, because they might have to bolt from the fields at a moment’s notice.

The two partisans stood in front of the prisoner. They removed their hats and mopped bare foreheads with open palms. The German did not lift his gaze from their boots. Plokhoi dropped a bead of sweat near the prisoner’s tethered legs, his black beard and raven eyes hovered like a storm above the prisoner’s head. Plokhoi spoke, his voice so restrained she could hear the madness in it.

‘What is your name and rank?’

Filip translated in a monotone. For Katya, the German tongue was guttural next to the fluid mouthings of Russian.

The prisoner lifted his chin and gazed up to Plokhoi. He seemed timid, Katya decided, afraid to give offense. Or no, something else.

Calculating. He wanted something.

‘Standartenführer Abram Breit.’

‘What is your unit?’

‘Erste SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.’

Plokhoi mulled these words. He hated everything German, this prisoner, the language of the enemy. Hitler’s name here in the cool barn under the glare of Colonel Plokhoi was like a match to straw, Katya sensed Plokhoi smoldering.

‘Filip.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell him everything I say. Word for word.’

‘Yes.’

‘Listen to me, Nazi.’

Filip translated this.

The prisoner did as he was told, raising his face full to the partisan leader. Filip spoke a quiet stream beside Plokhoi’s words.

‘It’s hard for me to keep from killing you right now. I have you here and no one would miss you. Your army thinks you’re dead already in that plane crash. You understand?’

Katya watched the translation strike home. The prisoner’s eyes tumbled for a moment, then returned to Plokhoi’s, and she saw the man did understand. He was going to be left alive. He was relieved, the lines in his face smoothed, and more. He seemed sorry for Plokhoi’s hatred, as though he knew and accepted the reasons for it.

Plokhoi and Filip continued.

‘If you do not do exactly what you are told, I will have you shot and nailed to a tree.’

The prisoner nodded, agreeable. This bothered Katya, that an SS

officer would behave this way, without defiance, with such cooperation. His name was Breit. He didn’t seem frightened. He didn’t know Plokhoi, or he would have been.

The prisoner said, ‘Ja.’

‘I’ve been given orders to have you taken back across the lines to be interrogated. My superiors think you know something. Do you know something, Standartenführer?’

‘J a.’

‘Good. Pray you live long enough to tell it.’

The German did not watch Filip speaking. Instead, he searched Plokhoi’s face for clues, gathering what he could out of Plokhoi’s tone.

‘Nazi?’

‘Ja.’

‘I have seen and lost far too much. So have my men. I am going to trust you to the mercies of the Witch here. She and this old man will deliver you across the lines tomorrow morning.’

Katya did not wait for Filip to make the full translation. She stepped to Plokhoi’s side. The partisan leader did not look at her, his eyes were screwed on the German.

‘Colonel,’ she said. ‘Colonel.’

Plokhoi glared down at her, the black furls of his beard wavered over his working jaw. She sensed the malice in him.

‘Colonel, a word.’

Plokhoi drew a deep breath. He’d heard her and ascended from whatever pit he’d been in. He turned to her. He bore her a smile, a strange counterpoint to his anger. Plokhoi was mercurial this way, it made him charismatic and dangerous.

‘Yes, Witch.’

‘I believe I know where Leonid Lumanov is.’

‘Your pilot.’

‘Yes. I intend to rescue him.’

‘You intend.’

Katya did not hesitate. ‘Yes. Tomorrow.’

Plokhoi said, ‘I don’t have orders for that.’

‘Yes you do. You had them a week ago. You never said they were rescinded.’

‘That’s true.’ Plokhoi appeared amused at her cleverness.

He said, ‘And what if you and Filip are captured? The two of you know a great deal about us by now, Witch. I think it’s safer asking you to stay out of sight and get across the lines with this Nazi than to take on a German garrison.’

‘My brothers,’ Filip piped up, ‘they will come, too. Seven of us. We’ll go with the Witch to get the pilot.’

‘No,’ Plokhoi decreed. ‘They’re not trained for that sort of thing.’

Daniel stood from his straw pile. ‘I’ll go along, Colonel. I owe her one.’

Big Ivan rose, too, coming alongside Daniel and nodding his great head.

‘We were supposed to bring him in, Colonel,’ he said. ‘I think we still ought to try if we can.’

Katya promised Plokhoi she would deliver the prisoner after retrieving Leonid.

‘Where is your pilot?’ Plokhoi asked her.

Katya did not look at Daniel and Ivan. She did not know who the traitor was in their cell. It could even be Plokhoi himself. But if they were going to help her retrieve Leonid, she would have to risk trusting them.

‘He’s close by,’ she answered. ‘Just fifteen kilometers away, in Kazatskoe. We’ll set out at sunrise as soon as curfew ends. After we have him, we can make our way northwest across the lines. I’ll hand your German over. But, Colonel, you have to let me do this first.’

Plokhoi scratched in his beard with dirty nails. ‘Josef will come with you. You’ll need him if there’s going to be more of your heroics, Witch.’

She heaved a sigh of gratitude. ‘Thank you, Colonel.’

Plokhoi put on his hat, expressionless. Daniel and Ivan went back to lying on their straw beds. Katya reached out to squeeze Filip’s arm.

The partisan leader opened the barn door. The day’s light blazed behind him. He called out, ‘Witch?’

‘Yes, Colonel?’

‘After you save this pilot of yours and deliver the prisoner, will you be going back to your air unit?’

‘I don’t know’

Colonel Bad tipped his cap to her.

‘Please consider it.’

* * * *

July 9

2130 hours

A farmer’s wife brought in a pot of stew. Outside the open barn door the first blushes of the long dusk filtered through the fields. Katya watched the villagers and partisans shuffle in together from the furrows, to move inside the huts and houses before the German-imposed curfew took hold here in the occupied land. The old woman shuffled past the enemy prisoner bound against the post, surprised to see him; this made sense, she did not know he was here. She stopped to look him over. The stew pot steamed in her hands, she gripped the kettle through her lifted apron. She nodded looking down at Breit, perhaps imagining some justice she wanted to befall this SS

man. She set out four bowls on the straw-strewn floor.

‘Five, Mother,’ Filip said. He jabbed his long nose at the German. ‘He has to go a long way tomorrow.’

The woman tossed another bowl to the ground. She did not pour the stew into them but set the pot down and smoothed her apron. She stared down at Breit. The German looked only at her dusty shoes. Katya knew this woman did not see one German tied up for her but all of them. Her old head sagged and she began to whimper. Filip rose and stood beside her, he put his arm gently around her shoulders and turned her away

‘If he’s too much trouble,’ the woman said, walking for the door, her voice trembling, ‘you can leave him here.’

Filip closed the barn door behind her. Ivan poured the stew into the bowls. Daniel handed them out. It was left to Filip to give food to the German.

‘ Danke,’ Breit said.

Filip spoke with the German. They kept their voices low in the fading light of the barn. Katya listened from where she sat. The language the two men spoke was harsh, it sounded like a sweeping broom. She thought about how little she knew of Germans and Germany. There had never been a need to be familiar with them, they were targets, invaders of Russia.

Nothing ever written or spoken about them by the Soviets had given the impression that these were men at all. Just cruel creatures to be stamped out by any means possible, no sacrifice was too great to kill a German. She watched this one sip stew out of the bowl with his tied hands, the way any man would. Filip squatted on his haunches at the prisoner’s feet. The two chatted. Filip nodded many times to things the German had to say.

Katya finished her bowl and set it down. Lana licked at it through the stall gate. Katya walked over to Filip and Breit.

‘The two of you be quiet,’ she said. ‘Filip, feed him and leave him alone.’

‘Witch,’ said Filip, looking up at her with a crinkled face, a serious mien. ‘Wait. This is an educated man.’

‘Educated in what?’ Katya wanted to kick the German’s ribs again.

‘Murder? Rape?’

Filip shushed her. He motioned Katya to come lower and to ease her voice.

Whatever he had to say on behalf of this German was not for Daniel and Ivan to hear.

Katya sighed with impatience. She took a knee beside Filip. The old starosta leaned close.

‘This is Colonel Abram Breit. He’s an intelligence officer. He says he’s not a combat soldier.’

‘Look at him, Filip. He’s covered in dirt. Look at his face, he was wearing damn goggles. He’s a tanker, an artillery man. He’s been fighting on the front lines. He’s even got a medal for it.’

While Katya growled, pointing at Breit’s uniform, medallion, and gritty face, Filip turned her words into quiet German so Breit could follow and reply. The German waited until Katya paused. He spoke to Filip, still avoiding Katya’s eyes.

The elder translated while the German talked.

‘I’m not dirty from fighting. I rode a motorcycle from Belgorod to the airfield. I wore goggles then, the road was crowded with trucks. Look, I carried no gun on me, not even a holster or a knife. The medal is for administrative work. I was an art historian. I am not a fighter. I have never shot anyone.’

Filip whispered all this to Katya. She listened, watching Breit’s lips while the elder spoke for him.

‘I don’t believe you. You were shot down in a bomber.’

‘I was heading back to Berlin. A bomber was the plane arranged for me. I had nothing to do with it.’

‘Why were you going to Berlin?’

‘I’m an intelligence officer. I was going to make a report.’

An art historian. An intelligence officer. If that’s what you say, good.

Now you’re a prisoner. That’s all you are anymore.’

‘No. I’m something else.’

The German looked squarely at Katya. He studied her face. He pivoted his eyes to Filip and whispered a question.

Filip turned to Katya.

‘He wants to know if he can trust you.’

Katya almost laughed when Filip gave these words to the German.

She laid a finger to her own breast.

‘Me? Trust me? I’m not the one he has to worry about. If he tries anything, Ivan over there will break his neck. Or Josef will cut it.’

The German shook his head even before Filip had translated any of this.

Filip said to Katya, ‘No, Witch. I don’t think that’s what he means.’

The starosta sat on crossed legs in front of the prisoner. The elder liked the mystery of this tied-up German, he was intrigued with the secrets that came in the barn with him. Filip was a Russian peasant, the ancient kind who had always loved his betters, a slave for the Tsars and now the Soviets. It was plain this prisoner had been schooled, he had bearing even tied to a post, he might even be a gentleman in Berlin. He worked some thrall over simple Filip.

‘Why are you here?’ Katya asked Breit. She wanted the German to say it, to admit in front of Filip that he beheld himself the master race, a destiny in his bloodline, to rule. She would kick him again for it and go back to her horse.

‘I was hit on the head.’

‘No…’ He tested Katya’s patience. ‘No, why is Germany here? In Russia. Making war.’

Breit composed his answer. He said only ‘Conquest.’

‘There,’ she said, slapping Filip’s arm when he translated the word.

The starosta nodded that she was right.

The prisoner continued. Filip perked up and listened, then sweetened more harsh German into Russian.

‘Conquest is merely a shorthand to greatness. It’s a sickness that every nation endures at some point when its pride has grown too fast. The urge to take overwhelms the will to create. It’s a malady of power. It’s something your country will go through, young lady. If you win this war, you watch. Keep an eye on what Russia does, then judge Germany.’

These words spilled from Filip, making the old man more eloquent than he likely had ever been. Filip had a German speaking for him now. A shiver crept through Katya. Filip talking this way seemed very wrong, a little invasion and occupation here in the barn.

She meant to put a stop to the conversation. She didn’t want to know any more about this SS officer. She was going to deliver him across the lines or see him killed in the process. She would send him back into his prisoner’s silence and give Filip back his volnitsa from this German’s tongue.

‘We will win,’ she said. ‘We are winning.’

‘Are you? What do you know?’

Breit cocked his head at her. Katya took in the gesture, then glanced over at Filip. The starosta was dumb, waiting for the German’s next utterance.

‘Do you know,’ Breit said through the elder, ‘that in the south the SS

has penetrated to your last defense belt? That the fighting has moved within sight of the towers of Oboyan? Your Soviet army is losing three men for every German soldier. Three tanks for every German tank. Planes.

Artillery. Everything. Do you know how long you can stand this kind of carnage until the weight of the battle shifts away from you? Do you? I don’t.

And I know a great deal more than you can imagine.’

Katya reeled at this. She had no idea, just as the prisoner implied.

What foot soldier or running partisan could ever know beyond what they saw? She had been shot down behind the lines just as the battle started.

This was the first news, not even Plokhoi told their cell how things were going. The battle for Kursk was surely huge, ranging over so much steppe, far beyond the struggles of one, beyond the rivers and bends in the earth, even past what she had glimpsed from her cockpit. But was this German telling the truth? Probably not. Why would he? He’s spouting propaganda.

Perhaps he believes what he says because it’s what he’s been told. Even so, she recalled the hundred-plus night bombing missions she’d been on.

The Germans always had more supplies to be blown up. Always another train puffing in. Germany was an industrial giant next to Russia. They’d declared war on England and America, too. What kind of people can do that? Could they still win in Russia?

Breit leaned forward against his ropes. ‘You do not know how important it is that Russia win this battle. The world will turn on what happens here. You have no idea.’

Katya made no reply. Why would an SS officer say that? The look on her face must have told the prisoner to keep talking.

‘I have in my head every fact. Every detail and number about the German assault on Kursk. I must get this information to the Soviets.’

Katya was befuddled. Of course that’s what he was going to do.

Tomorrow, after she’d gotten Leonid back. This Abram Breit was going to be handed over. He will tell whatever he has in that head to whoever puts a gun to it and asks. What was he talking about?

Breit said something to Filip. The old man gasped and rattled his gray head in wonderment.

Katya prodded. ‘What?’

‘He says,’ Filip whispered, ‘he is a spy. For Russia.’

Katya rubbed a hand across her forehead. She could not restrain a little chuckle. ‘So this is why he wants to know if he can trust me?’

‘Yes,’ Filip answered without speaking for the German, knowing what Breit would say. ‘He wants you to let him go.’

Katya nodded into the German’s eyes. She grinned mockingly.

‘Please,’ Breit said through Filip, ‘tell no one else. If either of you tells your commander, he will radio that he has captured a spy and ask for orders. There are many German spies in Moscow, in your army and your government. One of them will find out who I am. I’ll be intercepted and killed, either in Moscow or back in Berlin. You have to let me slip away. I am helping Russia. You must believe me.’

Katya puzzled at the tale. It was fantastic, that anyone would say these things after being captured. This German was inventive, and plausible in his performance, quietly frantic. This was a plot out of an adventure book, a fiction about a swashbuckling spy. She gazed at the thin, dirty German wrapped in ropes on this plank floor. This was no hero.

‘I will turn you over to a commissar tomorrow evening, Colonel. That’s when I will let you go. You can tell him all your numbers then. You’ll be a great help. Russia will thank you appropriately, I’m sure.’

Filip translated this without the sarcasm from her tone. Breit grew urgent.

‘You can’t! I must get back to Berlin!’

Katya stood, feeling the whiplash of anger. This was enough of Breit; he was something she’d been curious about - an enemy brought close for a little while, for an afternoon and night in a remote village barn - but like a cave she’d wandered into, now she was far enough from the light at the opening to turn around and go back. She lacked the desire to delve farther.

Tomorrow she would try to rescue Leonid, she may die in the attempt along with this German and the old starosta. She worried every day for Papa and Valentin, she grieved for Vera and too many others already. Where was the room in her for Breit’s pleading? If by any chance he was a spy, then he was a traitor to his own country, and the Cossack in her found that sour and wormy. If not, then he was just a liar and a coward. In either case, his story was not worth reporting to Colonel Bad. She would keep the prisoner’s secret, not because he asked her but because she would look foolish repeating it.

She was done with Breit. Time for him to become what he was, all he was, spy or no. A prisoner.

She walked away. She was not going to let him go. No one was going to do that.

* * * *

CHAPTER 18

July 9

2250 hours

Hill 260.8

Luis dropped a knee to the ground. He laid his palm on the earth. There was not a blade of grass under his fingers, or anywhere on the crest of the hill, just scorched flat ash. The dirt glowed pregnant with heat, not from the slanting sun but explosions. And it trembled.

His crew tottered around the Tiger. The men were the incarnations of exhaustion. Sooted faces gazed at shaking hands. The tank itself, as stern and hard a thing as it was, seemed to rest, steaming from the engine compartment, sighing gases out of the cabin through open hatches. In a hundred places on its skin, the zimmerit paste was cracked and dented from bullets and shells. Luis scooped a handful of dirt from this defended hill and let the grains dribble through his fingers, like a farmer with his black soil. He loved this ground because it was conquered.

The wreckage of the Russian resistance on this crest was everywhere. Abandoned American trucks tilted on blown tires bearing empty Katyusha missile racks in the beds. Artillery pieces with spiked barrels were left aimed at level trajectories, the fighting had been so close.

Only a few Red tanks remained behind when they retreated off Hill 260.8, just the ones blown to hell beyond repair. The battle for Kursk had become a tank battle, the Reds and Germans alike knew that, and the Soviets were uncanny at getting their smoking T-34s off the battlefield and ready for combat the next day. This was their genius, Luis thought, numbers. Men and machines and the dead. Around him lay more bodies than he’d ever seen on one field; the Russians got their tanks off this hill but there were too many dead to cart away.

Balthasar the gunner came to stand beside him, binoculars around his neck. The man smelled the worst of anyone in the crew. In days of intense fighting, Balthasar had worked the hardest, spinning the handwheel to elevate the giant gun, pressing his eyes to the padded browpieces to take aim, firing and finding another target. The others did their jobs, hoisting shells, working the radio and machine-gun, driving. But this one was the reaper. There is a God, Luis thought, and to undo His work there is a toll.

Balthasar showed that cost in his stink and in eyes that were barely able to focus after staring so long through magnifying optics, past cross-hatches and range numerals.

The young sergeant’s eyes blinked south over the reddening plain below the hill, where they had fought all that day. To the right, the battered Wehrmacht divisions of Grossdeutschland and 11th Panzer battled northward. Their infantry and armor swarmed along the Oboyan road to hold the gains of the day. Theirs was the heavy quiver in the earth because they were the only German forces moving up. Leftward spread the rest of Leibstandarte, holding its position, stretching five kilometers to the east and Sukho-Solotino.

Balthasar wanted something from the panorama below, he squinted to see deep into the ranks of Leibstandarte. Smoke filtered into the air from a dozen smoldering hulks, ruined and juxtaposed against the fifty tanks and twenty assault guns surviving in the division. A handful of shot-down airplanes littered the grassland too, bent propellers like dried daisies. Luis studied the young gunner beside him and for the first time wondered about him. So cool and competent, such a chill in his fighting, angular and Germanic in profile in the waning day. No wonder Hitler had been so confident to make his war, with a nation of these boys to do it.

Their uniforms were designed dark for a reason, to show off how white his soldiers were against them, how pure and potent they were. Not like the Soviets, in their yellow-brown khakis, earthen creatures, muddy. Balthasar stirred. He pointed.

‘There,’ the gunner said. ‘There they are.’

Luis followed the direction of the gunner’s dirty finger. Hunkering among the tanks and milling battalions of panzergrenadiers were three more Tigers, repaired at Luchki and put back into the field this evening.

Even at a distance, their great bulk was discernible among the Mark IIIs and IVs. Now Leibstandarte had four Tigers.

‘Just in time,’ Luis said.

Balthasar nodded. He turned away from the southern field and the long slope of Hill 260.8 they had taken. Six kilometers north lay the town of Novoselovka. Beyond the town, the river valley of the Psel ran wide and smooth. Luis could see deep into the plain, even through a gray haze of dusk and engine fumes. The Russians had retreated off this hill, into the town and that valley, girding their last hard defenses along the Oboyan road. Behind them, the Psel River was the final natural barrier to Oboyan, then on to Kursk. Grossdeutschland moved down the hill to form skirmish lines against the Reds in Novoselovka. The Soviet defenses could be cracked here, tonight, or tomorrow. Balthasar lifted his binoculars and spied across the steppe. Luis watched him, fascinated with the soldier’s blue eyes, opaline like Thoma’s. It takes a thousand years of solitude to make a blue-eyed people, Luis thought.

Luis put out his hand for the binoculars. Balthasar turned them over.

Through the glasses, beyond the Soviets’ spiny bunkers and trenches, rose the towers of Oboyan. The city was in sight, in reach.

‘In time for what?’ Balthasar asked.

Luis lowered the field glasses. In his breast pocket were four folded sheets, handed to him five minutes ago as company commander. The papers were Division Order No. 17, for II SS Panzer Corps.

Balthasar prodded. ‘We’re going to Oboyan, aren’t we?’

Luis turned west, away from the objective city and the precious road leading to it twenty kilometers over the steppe. Hill 260.8 stood as the deepest incursion into the Russian lines on the southern front. With one more strong heave, with Leibstandarte alongside 11th Panzer and Grossdeutschland, the Oboyan road would fall. But the forces guarding their right and left flanks were taking terrible hits from the Reds every day, and their northward pace continued to slog. Hill 260.8 was too far out in front and exposed to Red flank attacks. The drive on Oboyan was being thwarted not from the extended center but from the sides. So tonight, under the order in Luis’s pocket issued from General Hoth, the spear thrust of the German strike at Kursk was to be blunted and split into a trident. Eleventh Panzer had been ordered to pivot to the west, away from the Oboyan road, to clean up Soviet flank assaults north of Verkhopenye. Grossdeutschland would regroup here astride the road and relieve elements of Leibstandarte.

The three divisions of II SS Panzer Corps were directed to shift their advance away from Oboyan, to the northeast. The hope was that they would crush Soviet resistance there and unlock the gates for Kempf’s overdue army. The still-powerful SS divisions would encounter strong Russian reserves after wheeling to the east, but with enough Luftwaffe support, and the return of more repaired Tigers, Totenkopf, Leibstandarte, and Das Reich ought to smash open a new - though longer - route to Kursk.

‘No,’ said Luis, returning the field glasses to Balthasar, ‘we’re not going to Oboyan.’

He recalled the situation room in Belgorod. He envisioned the long paddles pushing the blocks of the II SS Panzer Corps off to the east, crawling past blue lines of steppe and forest and villages tonight and tomorrow, re-forming again into a lance. He thought of Breit and Grimm, smoking and sweating, the two of them, watching the grand collision take its shape, knowing that Luis Ruiz de Vega rode the first of the black blocks into the fight. He imagined the battle taking place just like that, a game of skittles, his lone block bowling the many red ones out of the way. He had no reason to believe it would happen any other way. He commanded the blue eyes of Balthasar, the blood of Thoma still riding on the Tiger, he had this hungry but tireless body, and a tank the Russians could do nothing to but pock and jostle. And now there were other Tigers returning to the fold, tomorrow and the next day would bring more. This change in direction to the east was fine with him. He didn’t care one way or another for the city of Oboyan or the road going to it. The Soviet forces in front of him had been sacrificed, they played their role and stopped the German advance on Oboyan. Good for them, they’d paid for it. But the II SS Panzer Corps remained unmauled and cohesive. It had been given a pivotal command by Hoth. The three divisions were going into battle alone this time, with no one to guard their flanks but each other. The fate of Citadel hung on him and the SS, like a medal, and this would showcase them as what Luis knew them to be: the finest fighting men and machines the world had ever witnessed.

There was still time. The Americans were not in Europe yet. He had in his grasp exactly what he wanted: The battle for Kursk had come down to him.

He laid his hand to Balthasar’s back. He did not feel spindly at all touching the broad muscles of the young soldier. Because he controlled them, they were his muscles, as well.

Luis faced east. The land there darkened first.

‘We’re going to Prokhorovka.’

* * * *

CHAPTER 19

July 10

0415 hours

Orlovka

Dimitri was glad to be soaked. He felt washed in the light rain, sweat and grease dribbled off him, some blood, too. Throughout the slight hours of the steppe night, the sky flared with the fighting that had stopped the Germans north of Novoselovka. The Oboyan road was denied to the enemy by 10th Tank Corps, 31st Tank Corps, by 3rd Mechanized Corps, and by the infantry of 6th Guards Army. Every one of these units was bled white over the last four days, only scraps were left of them. This was a shame, the way they had fought, what Dimitri had seen them do with fire and smoke, the tools of gods, it was a damn shame for Russia and mankind to have those men dead in such numbers. But the Germans would have to go around now, through somewhere else, not Oboyan, and fuck them, Dimitri thought. He sat against the General facing south, waiting for enough dusk light, his eyes on the flashes like crashing stars. After midnight the rain began and the vaulting glimmers were smothered, the night was being washed, too. Dimitri finally slept.

Awake now, he licked fresh rain from his lips. He was wet and suffering, starving and bone weary at war. Good, he thought. This is when a man rises. He needed his physical pangs, he could grapple with them and win, something he did not hope to do with the pain in his heart.

He walked to the front of the General. Mud sucked at his boots, a tasting, chewy sound, and he thought of food, the hot breakfast he would not have today. A deep gouge marred the sloped glacis plate below his driver’s hatch. This was where the Tiger’s shell struck and deflected after burrowing through the dirt berm of the crater. He balled his fist and laid all of it inside the scoop, this was how deep the shell had penetrated the armor.

There wasn’t much metal left, less than the thickness of a finger.

Something happened in that crater, something was left behind in its bowl. When Dimitri lifted groggy Sasha up on the tank deck, Valya came out of the hatch to help. Pasha followed. The son and the boy both glared down at Sasha, disapproving, as if Sasha were indulgent to be bleeding again. The look on Pasha’s platter face was the same as that on Valya’s, a sort of scowl from on high, that Communist disdain for the individual. And it is always individuals who bleed. Sides had been chosen, Dimitri could tell.

Pasha the loader joined with Sergeant Berko the commander, versus the two in the lower half of the tank, skinny quiet Sasha with his little machine-gun and penchant for being shot and old stubborn Dima. Sasha held on to the turret handles outside for the second time in three days while Dimitri jumped back into his driver’s seat and roared the T-34 out of the hole. The Soviet counter-assault from the hill shielded their retreat, and they got away. Valya sat on his rattling throne with Pasha beside him, the silent hot cannon between them, the wheels and dials of the tank all around him

-Valentin, the gunner hero - the ammo racks were all empty, the floor bins were rifled and depleted - Pasha the loader of every round - and no one spoke while old Cossack Dima scrambled them up the hill and back inside the withdrawing Red lines.

When he finally stopped, they were behind the defensive positions of the 3011th Rifle Division east of Novoselovka. Soldiers manned the hundred artillery pieces that had saved the General, they kept blasting away at the resumed German advance creeping up the Oboyan road. These men shouted Urrab! and raised their helmets to the little T-34 in their midst, the brave tank they’d rescued. Dimitri shut the engine down and clambered out.

Sasha had climbed down under his own steam, and a field medic was already there reaching for stitches and a bandage. Valentin lifted his hatch cover and exited the turret. The artillerymen gave him a cheer. Valentin smiled uncomfortably from the deck of the tank. Then he did something Dimitri had never seen him do. He lifted his arm and acknowledged the salvos of applause from the artillery. Dimitri detached himself from any emotion about the scene. He squeezed Sasha’s hand and left it for later to wonder about.

That was what he did now, in the drizzle, walking to the repair tent in the blue-gray morning. It was a terrible thing, he thought, that wave of Valentin’s. It was a wave of goodbye. Goodbye. I no longer belong to you. I am swept up in this applause. I have found a new home away from the village and the clan. I am a Communist and see how they welcome me back from the brink where you took us. I walk off on to my future unfolding, Father, away from the village, away from you, to Stalin the greater Father, Russia the only mother. I am not your son anymore. I am reborn. Hold the hand of your new son, Sasha the stripling. Save Sasha instead.

A metallic knock from under the repair tent reared him out of his reverie, and sadness ran down him with the droplets off his ears and nose.

He was drenched with a bowed head. Soldiers splashed past him on their way in their own lives. Dimitri felt nothing of the warmth of these men around him, they might have been made of iron.

He stepped under the tent, through a little cascade of runoff that spilled down his back in a cool rivulet. He lifted his head and shivered, putting on a carefree face, just a dirty tanker taking a morning shower in his dirty buttonless coveralls. A comic man, he was a bold one in a hard graying body, everyone’s father.

‘Hey,’ he shouted, ‘I need a welder.’

‘What for?’ came an answer from a big fellow behind a truck wheel.

‘I’ve got a fucking hole in my tank. I want to cover it up.’

‘Alright.’ The large man let the tire fall over and roll at his feet. His gesture said, A truck can wait for a tank.

Together with the mechanic, Dimitri gathered up the man’s welding tools, plus a tarpaulin and two metal rods. The mechanic had an angular face, he was bald, and powerfully built. He led the way out of the tent - he had to duck, he was so tall - to a quarter-ton truck parked with a large electric welding generator hitched to it. The rumbles of fighting eight kilometers to the south muttered under the rainfall and their sloshing boots.

The Germans would not get the Oboyan road; even so, they were keeping up the pressure to stop the Reds from going over to the offensive. The Germans weren’t quitting. They’d come close, maybe closer than they knew, to breaking through to Oboyan. The mechanic climbed into the truck, filling the seat with his midriff, the steering wheel almost touched his belly.

Cursing the nasty weather under his breath, he wheeled the truck and trailer through the mud, dodging the human traffic growing with the lifting light. He did not smile at Dimitri.

When they reached the General, Dimitri saw that Valentin and Pasha had not yet risen. Their boots lay side by side between the treads, pointing up, and the T-34 seemed to be some grand headstone for the two of them, a green sarcophagus carved in the shape of a tank to mark the heroes’ last place. The mechanic pulled up close to the General and got out, slamming the truck door, thoughtless of the late snoozers under the tank. He walked up to the glacis plate and ran his fingertips into the bottom of the scoop below the driver’s hatch. The big man whistled.

‘This was a Tiger.’ The mechanic looked up at the turret, at the name of the tank painted there by Dimitri only two weeks ago.

‘You’re the tank that was out front. The one in the crater.’

Dimitri nodded.

The mechanic wagged his head to say: You all ought to be dead.

Dimitri thought, Yes, we tried.

The man went back to the truck for the tarpaulin, then clambered up on the tank to hang the oiled sheet across the main gun barrel. Dimitri spread the tarp and secured it to make a tent, to keep the spot dry where the mechanic would work. The big man jumped down, mud sprayed. Dimitri stepped back. The rain tapped on his hair and shoulders, he was lost again, dissolved into the dank. He stared beneath the tank at the bottom of Valentin’s boots, the boots that rode like angels or devils on his shoulders in the tank.

The mechanic cranked up the generator. The pistons made a diesel racket, the generator coughed as though it had a cold in this dreary weather. But the engine sounded alright to the mechanic. He took his dark welding goggles from a hook on the trailer and slipped them over his cloth hat. He moved under the spread-out tarp and dried the glacis plate with his sleeve. He laid the first of the metal bars horizontally across the bottom of the sloped plating and lit his welding rod. The generator jerked into some higher mode and a blue flaming dot popped at the end of the wand in the mechanic’s mitt. Dimitri had to turn away, the electric dot was blinding. The mechanic set to work under the tarpaulin, glittering like lightning with the welding. Dimitri grabbed the tank fender and sprang onto the General’s treads and up on the deck. Yes, we tried, he thought, of the time in the crater. Maybe we succeeded.

Inside the turret, he unhooked from the wall the first of the three spare tread links the mechanic would wedge over the glacis plate between the two welded bars. Each link weighed almost half of what Dimitri weighed, but he hefted them one at a time out of the hatch and tossed them to the soft ground. They landed with splashing thuds. He left the hatch open when he was done, to let the rain fall in and wet Valya’s seat. He’d say he was sorry, he was busy.

Dimitri stacked the three links beside the flashing mechanic. His biceps and back muscles thickened with the strain of lifting and carrying the things, he sweat under the coating of drizzle. He stood back and watched the sparks fall and bounce around Valentin’s and Pasha’s boots.

The mechanic was almost finished securing the second bar when Valya and Pasha slumped around from the rear of the General, puffy-faced and aggrieved at being wakened to rain and welding. Valentin came over to inspect the work. The mechanic in his goggles and scorching noise did not know Valya was there behind him. Valentin waited to be acknowledged, then touched the mechanic’s shoulder. The man shut down his wand and turned, raising his goggles.

‘Let me take a look,’ Valya said to him. The mechanic shrugged, then backed from under the cover. He stood beside Dimitri and cut his eyes to the back of the lean sergeant bending over the still-smoking metal. He glanced at Dimitri. That your boy? the look asked. Dimitri nodded.

Valentin stayed under the tarpaulin longer than someone should who knew nothing about welding. The mechanic cast his eyes over at Pasha.

Dark specks of rain spattered on the boy’s dry coveralls.

Pasha asked the big man, ‘Did you hear about us?’

The mechanic’s chest jiggled. He laughs to himself, Dimitri thought, just like I do. He laughs at Pasha’s brand of heroism, at a boy stupid and ungrateful to be alive. How many other, quieter heroes has this mechanic scraped out of tanks into buckets to get the machines ready for another crew?

‘Yeah,’ he answered Pasha, indulgent. ‘I heard of you.’

‘We took out four tanks. And a Tiger. “We ran out of ammunition.’

Valentin was done looking at the welded bars. ‘Very good,’ he said, backing out from under cover.

‘I’ve got a little left to do,’ the mechanic said. He towered over Valentin, over all of them. ‘We’ve got to secure the links.’

Valya seemed uncomfortable. ‘Alright. Get to it then.’

Dimitri winced. This was how Valentin evened the score, always. He’d taught the young boy the sword, Valya had excelled with it in the sietch.

Now in life, Valentin the man knows nothing else.

The mechanic nodded his great bald head. ‘Yes, Lieutenant.’

Valentin wore the mustard and red badges of promotion. Dimitri had not noticed. It must have happened yesterday, while he was off finding new orders.

‘You should both know,’ Valentin said, taking in Pasha and Dimitri with a regal turn of his head. ‘We’ve been transferred. The three SS divisions are regrouping and moving east, around Oboyan. Some units from 3rd Mechanized and 10th Tank are being sent to reinforce 5th Guards Tank Army at Prokhorovka. I volunteered the General. We’ll leave as soon as we take on more ammunition. Where’s the machine-gunner?’

Dimitri said, ‘Sasha will be back from the infirmary this morning.’

Valentin turned away, certain of his victory over the mechanic, that seemed to be what he wanted, as though the mechanic had not come in the rain to help but to bring some encounter. Valentin was on a winning streak, he wanted to stay on it. He walked off to show there was some very dutiful chore on his mind. Pasha stayed behind, a stunned look on his face. He hadn’t known about Prokhorovka, either.

The mechanic was a kind man. ‘Four tanks. And a Tiger. Well done, loader.’ Pasha seemed ready to cry, not so heroic. Then he, too, turned away, to follow Valentin and fetch more ammunition, to return to the battle.

The mechanic smiled now.

‘Yes,’ he said with a different inflection than when he’d spoken these words to Pasha, ‘I’ve heard of you.’

He drew from his pocket a small jackknife. He opened the blade. With quick snips, he cut from his own coveralls all the buttons holding the fabric together over his chest.

‘Prokhorovka,’ the mechanic mumbled while he cut.

With the black buttons heaped in his large palm, he poured them into Dimitri’s accepting hands.

‘Here, Papa.’

* * * *

CHAPTER 20

July 10

0640 hours

beside the Vorskla River

kilometers southwest of the village of Vorskla The big one called Ivan woke him with a boot. Old man Filip brought him a canteen for a swallow, and that was all. He was untied from the barn post where he dozed the short night sitting up, drooling on his Merit Cross with swords. He was helped off the ground onto vague legs and tossed a wool jacket and a cap. He stripped off his SS coat and left it on the Russian ground bearing his lone medal. Abram Breit was put on a horse.

Now Breit wiped sweat from his brow with a freed hand. He held out his arm to examine the rope burn on his wrist.

Such heat, he thought, so early in the morning. What kind of people are made by this sort of land? The steppe was featureless, the little river dallied through it, only a bland green seam across a limitless fabric of yellows and greens, a bleak sky that seemed not lofty at all but oddly, oppressively low, heavy like water. The land makes the people. Are they harsh, too? Are they as dull as this? Certainly, they were as vast, from what Breit knew of the way the Russians fought and perished in their astonishing numbers. He studied the five partisans riding on all sides of him. They fit here. The land and they bore each other in their countenances, determined, endless, and yes, dull. Germans do not belong here, he realized. This is Asia. We are socialized. We were not left to grow so wild by such immense stretches without people. These Russians. These peasants, burdened and ignorant. They will be set loose on Germany if they win the war, on Europe.

Breit considered what he had done so far to help bring Hitler down, what he needed to continue doing, and was fearful for what might arise from his brave deeds and good intentions.

They rode in the open. The land was so flat that no German patrol could come within kilometers of them without being seen. The six were just a handful of Russians going between towns after daybreak, nothing suspicious about that in a landscape of farmers. Breit was no horseman.

His mount’s head bobbed walking along the river, balking and wanting to turn always out of the group, down to the water.

Filip rode alongside.

‘Tighten your reins, Colonel. The horse will go more smoothly.’

Breit took in slack from the leather straps. His horse nickered and shook his mane, objecting.

Breit was given his hands and feet. The ropes were looped and stored in the big one’s knapsack. His name was Ivan, a funny name for a Russian, it was the nickname the Germans used for all Russians, they were

‘the Ivans.’ A skinny one with slits for eyes was Daniel, who carried knives and guns bulging on him like pine cones. The woman was Katya. She was a pretty girl, almond-eyed and lean. The old man Filip called her ‘ Hexe,’ a witch, and did not explain why. Riding behind her, Breit made up his own reasons. She was a witch because she seemed as mean as anything out of a fairy tale. She rode her horse like a broom. She did not hate, though. Not like the old hard one named Josef. That one was a crow. He was black, silent, surely an evil portent when he appeared on any doorstep.

‘Filip,’ Breit whispered to the elder riding close to him. If he had any hope of getting away from these partisans - a slim hope, a dangerous thing even to consider - if he was even to survive the day, it would be this German-speaking old man who must help him. ‘May I have some water?’

The old one lifted the canteen from around his saddle horn. Breit took it and swallowed as much as he could. He did not know when he would be allowed to drink again. He was proven right when the big one barked something and Filip reached up for the canteen, splashing water over Breit’s chin in mid-gulp.

Breit did not know if the witch girl had done as he’d begged and not told anyone he’d said he was a spy. The leader of this partisan cell did not return to the barn and ask more questions; Breit figured he would have if the girl had mentioned anything to him. She’d probably tell the Reds when she handed him over, if he was alive for that. The Reds would interrogate him. The inquisitors wouldn’t have to lift a finger, he’d spill everything he knew about the German dispositions in the field. His wellspring of facts and figures could help the Soviets, of course, and might still tilt the battle their way if they acted fast enough on what he told them. But if he managed somehow to slip these partisans and reach Berlin, his information would come through Lucy. The Soviets would jump on Lucy intelligence within the hour of receiving it instead of reading a report several days from now penned by some obscure commissar. He needed to speak to the Soviets from Berlin.

The Hexe had made it clear, he was not going to be released, it was an absurd thing to ask. He knew it when he asked, but what else could he do? Filip whispered to him this morning not to try anything, they would hurt him for it, perhaps kill him. Breit knew, if the witch turned him over to the Red Army, that would likely be the end of him. At worst, he’d be shot after his interrogation, tossed into an unmarked grave in empty Russia. At best, the long miseries of Siberia.

He had no plan to escape. If he bolted, he’d be ridden down and brought back, or shot. There were no German patrols out this morning, every available soldier was either at the front or walking the train tracks to protect them from these same partisans. No, there would be no rescue. All of them except Filip - and this included the witch - looked like they’d just as soon slit his throat as have him along. The black partisan Josef seemed to be restraining himself from doing that anyway. How could he escape? He could not calculate his chances, he lacked enough facts. He supposed his odds were poor. Where were they right now, what river was that? Where were they going? He knew only that he was surrounded and abhorred. He could not out-fight or out-ride them. He was certainly no braver than them, these men and a girl who lived in shadows under the noses of an entire German army. He would have to out-think them. They were Russians, he could do it. But when would there be an opportunity for that, when being smarter might overcome being faster, harder, nastier?

Swaying in his saddle, his rear and crotch chafed. He was perspiring under the wool jacket and hat. He conjured images of his death, from a hole in the head, or freezing in Siberia, torture in Moscow. He missed his old life, the safe one spent in classrooms, in quiet galleries and Jew basements, even two days ago beside a map table, a spy. He invented artistic ways how Picasso might treat each of his deaths. A comical birdhouse inside the hole in his head. Five bodies attached to one strange head to depict his wintry shivering. Torture, Picasso would have a Cubist’s field day with that, suns and stars bursting inside a body broken into geometric bits.

Am I brave enough, Breit wondered inside the morbid gallery of his imagination, to make a break for it? I have a very valuable skin to save. I have a cause, a war to alter. I am historic. Will I try? Or will I shuffle out of the history books off to Siberia, quiet again, quiet forever? I don’t know.

When I became a spy, I didn’t prepare myself for dying, not the way a soldier does. I am so scared.

Breit decided to gather more facts, to watch for the elements of his day, the basics of his fate. Then he would see if he owned the courage to act.

He tried to prod his horse closer to Filip’s. With a few soft kicks, the animal broke into a little trot, then slowed and stumbled sideways.

‘Filip,’ he muttered, ‘where are we going?’

A rustle of hooves rose behind Breit. He turned his head in time to see dark Josef’s raised and swinging elbow. The blow caught him in the temple.

Breit would have collapsed out of the saddle but his boots snagged in the stirrups and did not let him go over. Through sizzles of pain in his skull, his senses took hold enough to tell him he was dangling, wincing into the ribs of his horse. He cowered behind a raised arm and clung to the saddle horn with the other. He feared to sit upright into another shot from Josef. He gulped air to quell the pounding in his head. He straightened before he tumbled to the ground. The reins had slipped through his hands, hanging loose around the horse’s neck. The stubborn animal began to angle down to the river. Breit blinked, doing his best to gather the reins in.

No one spoke. No one struck him again. Filip nudged his horse away to put distance between them.

* * * *

CHAPTER 21

July 10

0715

outside the village of Vorskla

Katya reined in her horse. The carbine strapped across her back jangled, the pistol in her belt poked at her abdomen. Filip stopped his mount beside her. Daniel, Ivan, and Josef hung back with the German prisoner behind the crest overlooking the village, out of sight in their saddles.

The Vorskla River ran glinting behind the rows of small houses. The village was partitioned by pickets and dirt alleys. Women milled in the spaces between structures with aprons empty of bread, no chickens to feed, and no seed to toss them if there were. A few men bent in the broken fields, scavenging for unripe vegetables to eat. Filip shook his head. He was still the starosta of this village, and it was dying. He tugged the brim of his felt hat and rode forward without Katya. She prodded Lana and moved behind him down the long incline to the sad streets.

Approaching the village, a clutch of women looked up at the clopping horses. The women moved closer together the way penned animals do, until their hips touched, their aprons made a white barrier to the two riders.

Filip was their elder. This made no difference to the old women barring his way. Filip rode into the village with a partisan.

One of the women spoke up to Filip. The elder man had drawn himself very erect, his hands were crossed on the saddle horn. He donned the cold posture of the brigand, of Colonel Plokhoi.

‘You’re back,’ the woman said.

Filip nodded. His wide brim bobbed, shading his face.

‘Leave him alone, Filip Filipovich,’ the woman said. ‘He’s your brother.’

The starosta made no notice of her words.

‘He’s frightened, Filip Filipovich,’ she said.

The elder lifted his eyes from the woman. He goaded his horse toward her and the three women beside her, women Katya decided were her sisters. The aprons parted and Filip rode past without another glance downward. Katya followed.

The morning street raised dust under their hooves. The northern horizon was quiet now, the sounds of the battle raging did not reach the village. Vorskla was no longer just ten kilometers from the front, the Germans had pushed the Soviet lines far back. How far, Katya did not know. But it was a bad thing that she did not hear the fighting.

Every movement in the village stopped when they rode past. The few men straightened in the fields to look over the tops of stalks and grasses, they looked like scarecrows in white billowy blouses. Women continued to gravitate toward each other, pressing shoulders and hips, whispers to ears.

Filip rode to a small blue house. Its eaves were festooned with white gingerbread and shutters. Filip stopped in front of the porch. Neighbor women came on their stoops to watch and cluck. Katya saw her first child in this village. A boy, very dirty, gripped a woman’s skirt and pulled it in front of him, a naive shield. Filip did not dismount. He waited, his horse shifted, the rifle on Filip’s back creaked, the leather and harness rattled.

The door to the house stood open, the day was going to grow hot.

Inside, the house was full of shadows. Filip stared straight ahead, some duel of wills going on with the brother inside. The man’s a coward, Katya thought. He’s a collaborator. Enough.

She slid off her horse and hit the ground walking. Before she’d taken two steps, the pistol was in her hand and cocked.

‘Nikolai!’ the starosta called to his brother. Katya halted.

Inside the house, footsteps dragged on the boards. A man emerged from the shadowed rooms. Katya stood in the full steppe sun and it took a moment for her to realize what she saw standing on the rickety porch.

Filip’s twin.

The two old men shared the same nose, lean stature, gray grimness, everything that brothers born seconds apart can share. But in a moment Katya saw what they did not have in common. This brother was weak. Filip would truly kill him one day.

Filip spoke. ‘You’re coming with us.’

The twin eyed his brother with a wary grimace. ‘I’m no fighter. You’re the fighter.’

Katya kept herself in check. She almost spoke for Filip Filipovich, she almost said to this brother, ‘And you’re the traitor. Now get on a fucking horse.’

‘Katya. Get the others.’

Filip did not look away from Nikolai. The eyes of the two were ensnared, the brothers’ glares tangled like snakes across the dusty road.

Katya tucked the pistol into her belt. She swung to her saddle and turned for the hill where the others waited with the prisoner and an extra mount.

Riding away, she saw over her shoulder Nikolai turn and go back inside his house. Filip stayed in his saddle, staring after his brother, his face obscured under the big felt hat.

* * * *

July 10

0800 hours

three kilometers west of Kazatskoe

The partisans, Breit the prisoner, and Nikolai the traitor rode through an eerie peace. They took their horses and the empty mount into the open, across fallow fields and wide vales of grass. The sun stood at its highest and the horses walked on their own shadows. Nothing impeded the riders’

vision for many kilometers, the land sprawled even and untended. The riders were far from the fighting here and the day appeared normal, sunny and quiet. Katya was lulled for a little while by the sounds of hooves in dirt, men in saddles, and the gold of warmth on her skin.

None of the men spoke. Filip rode in front, leading his twin brother to Kazatskoe. Daniel and Ivan came next, riding on either side of the German.

Breit kept his mouth shut since Josef had clouted him, and he rode better, too, wanting no more attention for himself. Good, Katya thought, she had enough to worry about. Josef came at the rear. She turned to look at him from time to time to be sure the man was still there, separate and grim.

She cued her horse ahead of Daniel, Breit, and Ivan. She passed Nikolai. The brother’s head was down, as though riding to his gallows. She sidled up next to Filip. The starosta did not turn his head.

‘Are you angry with me, Filip?’

‘Yes. I don’t want to do this.’

Katya leaned from her saddle to touch the old man’s forearm. ‘I know.’

‘He’s my brother.’

Now Filip swiveled his face to her. His eyes glistened.

‘It’s easy, Witch, when he’s not right here behind me. It’s easy to talk about how I’ll do this and that. But I understand him. Better than anybody.’

His long nose was sharper than any feature of the landscape. His eyes were fixed on nothing Katya could see with him.

‘I’m sorry, Filip Filipovich.’

The starosta nodded, his big brim dipped.

‘We were all so hungry, Witch. I’m sure you don’t understand that kind of hunger. The Germans gave us food because Nikolai helped them. They stopped punishing our village, stopped taking our men. Nikolai saved us. I ate the food. I lived in my house. I’m as bad as him. I won’t judge him.’

Katya looked into the sky, her former battlefield, and thought of the danger she’d met up there in the past year. She and all the warriors, on air and ground and sea, they forgot. They were young and they bled, they gathered the war to themselves like their own hell and they did not see this old man and his old twin brother, how war does not always come in a different uniform or bursts of flame but may come as your brother, your village, your own soul. What can war not break? Nothing, if it can break a family. She blinked at a sudden tear. She turned her cheek away from Filip, to let it dry in the breeze before she spoke.

‘Is he there, do you think? The pilot?’ She kept to herself that his name was Leonid, she hid in her breast who the pilot was to her.

Filip sighed and considered. ‘Yes. Nikolai said he was there three days ago. With so much going on at the front, I doubt there’s been time to take him anywhere else.’

‘Did you ask him if he knew the pilot’s name?’

‘He doesn’t. Nikolai asked… other questions for the Germans.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Average. Brown hair. Slender.’

‘What color eyes? Does your brother remember?’

‘His eyes were too swollen to see their color, Witch.’

She envisioned this. Leonid, she thought. God, Leonid. She asked,

‘What will happen if we don’t get to him?’

‘He’ll be taken back to Germany as a slave. Or shot.’

The starosta said all this without emotion. He almost relished making these dire descriptions and the prediction, dispensing for Katya some pain to counterweight his own agony. He’d guessed the rescue of the pilot meant more to the Witch than freeing a downed Soviet flyer. Katya said nothing more. Filip was entitled. She’d brought him out here, to face his twin and save Leonid, for her own purposes. She pulled in her reins and let Filip ride past, then came Nikolai, the same man made twice, their hurt borne on two horses. Daniel and Ivan with the prisoner caught up to her.

‘Collaborator,’ Ivan sneered loud enough for Nikolai to hear. Daniel added nothing. Ivan jerked his head at Breit. ‘At least this son of a bitch wears a uniform. He won a medal.’

They rode for another hour, skirting Tomarovka on their right. They cloaked themselves in the safety of the open, riding as innocuous peasants. From a distance they’d look smudged and humble, posing no danger. Besides, the Germans were not on the lookout for partisans during the daylight hours. The night was when the partisans struck.

At 0915 hours the village of Kazatskoe appeared, an oasis of farm buildings in an expanse of greens and brown. From her saddle five kilometers away, the village appeared to Katya something dreamy and liquid, standing in a pool of shimmering heat mirage against the earth.

Three silos rose as centurions, the rest of the village hunkered around them, homes and outbuildings. Five days ago when the battle started, this place was only four kilometers from the front lines. Now it was a drained place, intact but emptied. The Germans had billeted here, fortified the little town, then moved north with their attack. They left silence, like a spoiled well. There should be tractors, she thought, there should be a blacksmith’s anvil clanging through this heat, laundry snapping on lines. The war was here in the ghosts of sound.

Josef trotted forward.

‘You all stay here,’ he ordered with his sunken-eyed intensity. The riders stopped.

Nikolai did not turn his horse, he fixed his eyes on Kazatskoe and his back on Filip.

‘ Hiwi.’ Josef snarled the curse name for collaborators at the rear of Nikolai’s head. ‘Turn around, hiwi.’’

Nikolai made no move to comply. Big Ivan grunted. He wheeled his mount beside the twin and snatched the reins to bring Nikolai around to face Josef. The prisoner Breit gritted his teeth, he knew already that Josef was no one to ignore. Filip could not watch. He hung his head and the brim of his hat again covered his eyes.

‘The hiwi will take me into the town,’ Josef said. ‘We’ll find the house where the pilot is. Then we’ll come back and decide what to do. Hiwi.’

‘Yes.’ Nikolai answered with a quaver in his chin, like a man answering a judge, or the Reaper.

‘Know now I will kill you the instant you do anything other than what I tell you.’

‘I know.’

‘If you take me to any house but the one the pilot is in, you won’t come back from that village.’

Nikolai rested his eyes on black Josef. Seconds passed in the crackling quiet field. The twin seemed to soothe, a man finally at his destined place, at his gallows.

‘Yes,’ answered Nikolai.

Josef swung in his saddle to face Breit.

‘Nazi. If you twitch the wrong way, Daniel will shoot you out of the saddle. Tell him, Filip Filipovich.’

Josef swung his horse now to Katya.

‘Witch,’ he said, ‘I’ll find your pilot for you.’

Katya was stunned. Josef tipped his hat brim to her and turned.

Nikolai fell in and the two rode toward Kazatskoe.

She watched them go, amazed at the turn in Josef. She trusted what he’d said.

Ivan nestled his horse beside Katya, gazing off at Kazatskoe with her.

Daniel was restive. He dropped from his saddle to grab a stem of grass, then climbed back up to chew on the blade. He settled behind the German, as though measuring Breit for a bullet. Filip sat his horse alone, head slumped away from the hot world. The four of them waited like this under the sun, sweating and without shade.

‘I hope we find him,’ Ivan said. ‘Is this pilot your lover?’

Katya was uneasy with the question. ‘Lover.’ It was a term from peacetime, when girls and boys paired off like that, not when they were forced to spend years away from home - changing and hardening years -

not when they died by the hundreds and thousands every day. And there was Filip, lonely and hating being here, a man who’d claimed he would murder his brother. Could Katya have a boyfriend in front of poor Filip?

‘Yes,’ she said without intending. ‘Yes,’ she said, needing it to be so.

‘Good for you,’ said Daniel from behind the German. He spit out the weed and climbed down to pluck a new one. He looked up at Katya. He seemed wounded somehow by her smile.

Josef and Nikolai were gone no more than thirty minutes. They returned across the long field; at a distance they rode on shimmers from the heat. Katya wanted to ride to them but Ivan stopped her. ‘We wait,’ he said, ‘like we were told.’

The two came slowly, no need for haste and attention. Josef rode behind Nikolai, who kept his head down, the match to his brother Filip.

When they were close, the twins did not look at each other.

‘There’s a house on the western edge of the village,’ Josef said. ‘I couldn’t get a look inside the windows. But there are two guards. The hiwi says the guards were there a couple of days ago when he was taken to that house.’

‘He’s in there,’ Nikolai said.

Katya’s heart gripped. There was a pilot in that house. Was it Leonid?

‘What are we going to do?’ Daniel asked, standing beside his saddle.

‘Wait until dark?’

‘No,’ Josef decided, scratching deep into his beard. ‘The village is mostly deserted. There’s maybe two dozen Germans spread out, staying out of the sun. If we go in after curfew and we’re spotted, we’re definitely partisans. I say now, while there’s only the two guards.’

‘How do we get inside?’ Ivan asked.

Josef shook his head. ‘I don’t know yet.’

The sun beat on them pondering this question. Katya waited for Josef to concoct a plan. The horses shifted hoof to hoof. Filip never raised his gaze from beneath his brim.

Katya spoke.

‘Nikolai?’

‘What?’ the twin answered. He’d become more lively than his brother.

Perhaps he hoped to wipe away his stain by helping free the downed pilot.

‘The two guards. Were they the same ones who were there three days ago?’

‘I don’t… let me see. Yes, I think yes. I’m sure at least one of them was.’

‘Alright. Ivan, how much food do we have with us?’

Ivan swung his backpack around and dug into it. He pulled from it a canteen and a broad, hard loaf.

‘Bread and water,’ Katya said. ‘Perfect.’

Josef asked, ‘You have an idea, Witch?’ The dark man looked at her with new eyes today. Katya worried all the time who in the partisan cell might be the spy, who had betrayed the Night Witches and the partisans beside the railroad. She’d been troubled that it might have been Josef, he seemed so distant and embittered. She began to believe it would not prove to be him.

She pointed at the twin. ‘At least one of the guards has seen Nikolai before, right? He knows Nikolai is an interpreter.’

She swung the finger to the starosta, stricken in his saddle. Filip seemed to have swapped roles with his traitor twin, he bore the millstone of guilt now.

‘Filip will go instead. The guard won’t know the difference. I’ll pose as a nurse and go with him carrying the food. We’ll tell the guards we’re waiting for the Gestapo, they’re going to interrogate the prisoner again. We’re there to feed the pilot and get him ready. We’ll get one of the guards to come inside. Then Josef, you take care of the one outside.’

‘And the guard inside, Witch?’

She thought of Leonid’s face, too bashed to tell the color of his eyes.

His eyes were blue. Sky blue. She fingered the knife at her hip, the pistol in her belt.

‘I’ll do what I have to.’ She looked over to the starosta. The old man still eyed the warm ground.

Josef turned in his saddle to the soldiers Daniel and Ivan, book-ends around the German prisoner. Breit did not understand anything being said, his eyes darted to every speaker.

‘Alright,’ Josef said. ‘When both guards are down, you two come with the Nazi and the extra horse for the pilot. Witch, you and Filip…’

‘I’ll go.’

Nikolai sat straight in his saddle. The twin spoke with his chin high; his brother peered out from under his brim to listen.

‘Filip can stay here where it’s safe. I’ll go. They know me.’

Katya cut her eyes to Josef. Even under such a sun, his gaze was hooded.

‘I’ll go,’ Nikolai said again. ‘I’ve done enough to my brother.’

Josef growled, ‘Shut up, kiwi.’ He faced Filip. ‘Old man? Go or stay?’

Filip raised his head to his twin. Katya watched them stare at each other, the two faces so identical, and so different.

‘No,’ the starosta said. ‘Nikolai will tell the guards. He’ll get the Witch killed and he’ll make a run for it. You can’t trust him. I’ll go.”

Filip pivoted to Katya. The elder nodded at her. The resolve she’d seen earlier on Nikolai’s face was now on Filip’s, the gallows. ‘I’ll do what I have to.’

Josef wasted no time for the tempest on Nikolai’s face; the twin wanted to object but everyone had turned their backs to him. Daniel swung up in his stirrups, a fresh weed clamped in his teeth. Ivan handed the bread and canteen to Katya.

‘I’ll be one minute behind you, Witch,’ Josef said. ‘Count to sixty before you make a move. Start counting when you get inside. I’ll be watching. If you hear gunshots, you’ve got to act quick. The rest of the garrison will come running, we’ll only have a few seconds. Daniel, you and Ivan stay a hundred meters back. When you see us come out with the pilot, bring the horses fast. Bring the German, and the hiwi, too. If either one of them flinches the wrong way, kill him. Filip, give me your rifle. Witch, the pistol.’

The starosta unstrapped his carbine from his back and handed it over. The German guards would not let any Russian come near them with guns, not even a turncoat interpreter and a peasant woman in men’s clothing. Josef reached for the loaf of bread in Katya’s hands. He ripped it open at one end, the stiff crust snapped and flaked. He scooped out a plug of soft bread.

‘Give me your knife.’

Katya pulled the blade from her belt. Josef unsheathed it and slid the knife inside the crust, then packed the white pulp on top of the grip to hide it. He handed the loaf back to Katya. The bread had an odd and deadly weight.

Josef nodded to Katya.

‘The blue house on the far western street. There’s a broken shutter on the front. Look for the guards. You’ll see them.’

‘Blue house. Shutter,’ she repeated.

‘One minute.’

‘Once we’re inside. I understand.’

‘Good. Go get your pilot, Witch.’

Katya moved out, Filip at her side. She remembered the last words of Vera. Go get him.

* * * *

July 10

1030 hours

one kilometer west of Kazatskoe

Without hurry, Filip and Katya rode toward the western rim of the village.

The sun seemed not to have moved from its noon-high perch. It glowered on the two riders, hot and intent, in audience to the rescue they would attempt. Katya sweated in her loose wool coat. She wanted shade and rest.

She wanted not to be afraid. A few times during the ride to the village, she glanced behind her to spot Josef. The man rode far to their left, then was nowhere to be seen.

Filip dug out a kerchief and handed it to Katya.

‘Put this around your hair, Witch. You need to look more like a peasant.’

She mopped her brow with the red rag, then quickly tied back her hair with it.

Filip asked, ‘Have you ever killed a man?’

Katya thought of her missions, hundreds of raids. ‘I’ve dropped bombs.’

‘I mean ever killed a man looking into his face.’

‘No.’

‘I haven’t, either,’ the starosta said.

The elder raised his eyes and looked around him, at the nearing village, dark soil hot as tar under the horses’ hooves. He gazed into a blazing sky. He grimaced under his hat.

Katya cradled the loaf in her arm, sensing the knife stashed inside it.

It was strange to be in this world, to have a reason to kill. A need to kill. She thought of the weight of a life, how heavy would it be in your hand if the years could be stacked? Would it weigh less than the knife? Yes. A knife, a bullet, a shard of shrapnel, they all outweigh any life. She was sure men had died under her Night Witch wings, and she never once felt the weight of their deaths. It was insanity for it to be so. She rode toward this madness with a life tucked inside the bread, held easily in one hand. It was strange because this was not the real world, girls and old men going off to kill; this was a war world, temporary, a nightmare where the only way to wake up was to stay asleep and kill enough. And it was strange, too, because now she was not afraid, the twisting in her stomach was gone. She said Leonid’s name out loud, to announce the release of her fear.

‘Is that your pilot?’ Filip asked.

‘Leonid Lumanov. Yes. My pilot.’

Less than fifty dwellings made up the hamlet, with a half dozen large barns clustered near the silos. Nothing moved in the streets or alleys, the barns were empty and cool, a handful of scattered military vehicles baked in the open. A wind vane creaked somewhere. Their horses made the only living sounds.

The blue house with a busted shutter stood near the end of its dirt street. She cued her horse toward it.

She opened the canteen, her mouth was parched. She swallowed and offered the water to the elder. He declined. The look on Filip’s face was kindly, his many wrinkles arranged themselves into a melancholy welcome of what awaited them. It was a brave face. Impulsively, Katya reached to touch the old man’s arm.

‘You’re the interpreter. You were here three days ago. I’m a nurse.

We’ll get inside and I’ll start counting. Even if it’s not Leonid in there, we’re going to get the pilot out. Just move when I move.’

‘Yes, Witch. I hope it’s your pilot.’

Katya felt the twinge of both sides of this coin, that it would not be Leonid lying beaten in that blue house, scared that it would be.

‘We can do this,’ Filip said, squeezing her hand before letting go.

They rode up the last of the street. A curl of smoke issued from the porch of the house, a guard sat there on the steps smoking, his machine pistol lay across his lap. He peered at them across the sunny day. They did not dismount, staying in their saddles until the guard rose and donned his helmet. He took a few steps into the lane. He did not toss away the cigarette but kept it between the fingers he slipped around his weapon.

‘Ja? Was ist lost’

Filip answered in German. He indicated himself, then Katya. She held up the loaf of bread, feeling the heft of this guard’s life inside it. Another guard appeared around the corner of the house. He called to the one in the street. They waved to each other with lackluster motions, dulled by the heat and boring duty. The second guard eyed the two riders and went back to his station at the rear of the little house. The soldier in the street barked at them to come down and tie up their horses. He returned the cigarette to his lips and waited.

Filip and Katya dismounted. Katya felt as though the point of the knife inside the bread were held to her own innards. Filip was intent and silent.

They tied the horses to the porch railing. Katya stroked Lana before moving away, to compose herself.

The guard climbed the steps. Filip went second, Katya, with the loaf tucked under her arm, came last. She walked across the threshold and began the count. One. The reek that assaulted her inside was unmistakably human.

The room was bare, stripped down to the wood floors and plaster walls. A single chair, stiff-backed and old, stood in the center. Katya knew the chair in an instant for what it was, like this house, it was an innocent thing become wicked. Two, she thought.

Leonid lay curled in the far right corner.

Katya heard herself gasp. She flicked her eyes to the guard, but Filip covered the sound with conversation and the guard made no reaction to her. Three.

She reined herself in tight, she knew she would dash across the room to him if she did not. Four. Leonid did not open his eyes, he lay motionless with his wrists between his knees. She approached him, holding the bread out now like a gift, to keep both her hands full so she would not cradle him.

She knelt beside him. She set the loaf on the floor. Nine. Leonid’s face was bruised and swollen, dark and straining the skin, the brutal fruit of his interrogations. Had Nikolai stood here asking the questions in Russian while this was done? She glanced back to Filip and saw him staring down at Leonid, wondering the same. The guard asked Filip a question. Even in a foreign tongue Katya could tell Filip’s reply was terse. Eighteen.

She stroked Leonid’s hair, to gentle him awake. His hair was matted, filthy. His ear was crusted brown from blood, probably a burst eardrum. His body stank with the biting tart of urine. Katya pressed her hand harder to his forehead. His eyelids flickered. Twenty-seven.

She did not say his name, the guard would catch that. She murmured,

‘Lie still. It’s me, we’re here for you. Pretend to be unconscious. Can you walk?’

Leonid’s head bobbed one tremor under her hand.

‘Be ready,’ she said.

Thirty-five.

Katya’s heart beat like an engine when she took up the bread and rose from the floor. She turned to Filip and the guard. The soldier smiled at her. She resisted any urge to determine anything about this German, his age, skin tone, his own smells of cigarette and summer wool. She returned his smile and looked only at his hands on his machine pistol. She counted Forty. Filip faded behind the guard.

She walked forward. The chair in the middle of the room stood in her path to the guard. She envisioned Leonid in it, tied to it. She held out the loaf, hiding the opened end behind her palm.

‘Would you like a piece of bread?’

Forty-five.

The guard slung both his elbows over his machine pistol hanging across his waist. He nodded at the bread, yes, he would like some. And you shall have it, thought Katya.

Fifty-two.

She tore away a portion of the bread, keeping the opened end facing her breast. The guard reached for the offered chunk. The black metal haft of the knife was there, ready for her fingers. She dug her hand into the crust, as though to pull for the soldier another hunk. Filip slipped closer behind him. She did not look into the guard’s face as the man brought the bread up to his mouth.

Sixty.

She closed her hand around the knife’s haft, buried in the cool spongy bread. She took a step toward the guard, to have her momentum driving forward. She let her mind flee for one beat to Leonid in the corner behind her, to the purple of his lips and sockets, his stench, mentally touching him like she had touched the horse outside, for calm and power.

The gray of a German uniform was one stride away, crumbs tumbled down the buttons. The knife was held tight in her hand. She kept her eyes fixed to the guard’s chest, to the spot above the dangling gun, beneath the crumbs, at the heart.

Katya plunged the dagger deep above a pocket on the tunic. The German’s hands tried to rise but Filip pinned his arms at the elbows. The haft of the knife shook with the violence of the guard’s reaction, the man’s throat was plugged by a swallow of bread, he choked out a cry, the knife handle jerked loose from her grip. She was shocked by this because she thought she’d held it with all her might, believed she’d stabbed the blade into the man’s working heart as hard as she could, but the German still stood, wrestling in Filip’s old grasp, he did not go down, the knife stuck in his chest, not dead. He made another strangled cry, bucking in Filip’s arms, twisting back and forth, left and right. Filip strained to hold him. Katya followed the handle with seeking and urgent hands, to catch it and draw it out to shove it in again, to cut the man’s throat if she had to, but Filip could not hold him still and the haft evaded her, she struggled at the guard’s chest to grab the knife and could not.

The guard coughed out the gob of bread, the wad hit Katya. He screamed. One of his hands broke from Filip’s clench. He fumbled to lift the machine pistol. The knife handle, slick with blood, slipped through her fingers again. Where was Josef? Where were the others?

Panic jettisoned into her blood. Filip lost his grasp, the guard reeled back a step from her, knocking over the chair. Filip tried again to control the frenzied guard but was thrown off. The soldier had both hands on his gun now. The knife protruded from his chest like the key to a mad wind-up doll.

The soldier twisted away from her, badly out of balance but keeping his feet. He juggled the barrel of the gun to raise it at Filip. The old man jumped sideways and the quick burst from the machine pistol hit him in the hip. Filip went down yelling. Staggering, the guard turned his head for Katya. He licked blood off his lips. The machine pistol wavered to find her.

She would not die motionless. She hurled herself at the guard.

A strong hand snared her from behind. She was stopped and flung aside.

Leonid flashed past her, another mad doll, this one broken and filthy but infuriated. He was on the guard in a single long step, shoving the machine pistol down with one hand. He grabbed the haft of the knife with his other fist and plucked the blade from the guard’s chest with a strength born out of fury, then hacked it into the German two, three, four more times, in and out, dicing the man’s heart until the guard’s knees were on the floor, and again Leonid drove in the knife.

Leonid breathed hard. He left the dagger in the guard and stood, teetering, emptied of rage and strength. Katya caught him before he sank beside the corpse. There were only seconds left until the rest of the German garrison hurried to this little blue house on the edge of the village to investigate the gunshots.

The door burst open.

Josef filled the opening. His pistol was leveled. The old partisan stepped into the bare room. His mitts were bloody. He took in the dead German with one glance, saw the rips in the soldier’s chest and the spreading pool beneath him, and raised an eyebrow at Katya. Without a word, he moved to Filip on the floor. He gathered the old man to his feet.

‘Can you ride, old man?’

Filip made no reply. Supported by Josef, he scowled and tested his wounded hip with a few struggling steps.

Katya led Leonid toward the open door. The clatter of saddles and horseshoes swirled in the street outside. He hesitated in Katya’s grasp.

‘Leonya, we’ve got to hurry’

‘The rest of the garrison is coming,’ Josef added with urgency. ‘We have to get out now.’

‘No,’ Leonid said, resisting Katya’s tugs. He twisted in her arms, pointing behind him into the house, at a closed door. ‘A woman. In that room. Another… prisoner.’

Josef left Filip. The starosta hobbled standing alone, favoring his right side. His trousers were torn below the belt where the bullet caught him.

Josef sprang to the closed door.

‘Get them outside,’ he ordered Katya. ‘The horses are there.’

In that instant, gunfire spat from the rear of the building. The shots were answered by others, farther away, burps of bullets from German weapons. Ivan’s voice drilled through the walls and the rifle reports,

‘Dammit, Witch, get out of the house!’

Ivan was holding off the approaching German troops. Daniel must be outside with the horses and the German prisoner and Nikolai. Josef crashed into the back room. Katya impelled Leonid forward.

Daniel appeared on the porch, his pistol raised. In that moment, Josef emerged from the room with a woman clinging to his arm. She was starved and frail, her skirt and blouse stained; she’d been a beautiful girl before the abuse she suffered in this house. Now she was a dirty wraith.

The gun battle at the rear of the house surged. Ivan shouted again to Katya, firing his carbine.

In the bright doorway, Daniel did not lower his pistol. He looked across the room, past the corpse on the floor and the spilled chair and blood at the girl wavering on Josef’s arm. She said something, too weak for Katya to hear over the gunshots outside.

Daniel aimed the pistol at Josef.

‘Let her go,’ he said.

Josef stepped forward, drawing the feeble girl close. Filip gimped backward from Daniel’s raised gun until he stood beside Josef and the girl.

‘This is your wife,’ Josef said.

Daniel answered, ‘We’re taking two horses. Let her go.’

Katya tensed. Outside the horses nickered, frightened by the gunfire coming quicker and closer. Leonid swayed on her arm, bewildered. The girl looked at Daniel with frenzied eyes, confused. Why was her husband aiming a gun at the people who’d come with him to rescue her and the poor Soviet pilot?

She got her answer when Katya spoke.

‘You’re the spy in the cell,’ she said.

‘Shut up, Witch.’

The girl’s face twitched. She tried to move to her husband but Josef would not release her. Daniel took a step closer, sighting down his pistol at Josef’s head.

‘Let us go, Josef. Please.’

Katya thought of all the dead betrayed for this man’s wife. Their deaths choked the room, partisans and Witches. Leonid, nearly beaten to death. And herself, almost killed beside the tracks when Daniel told Ivan to blow the charge. She had no weapon, the knife was plunged in the German.

‘Please, Josef,’ Daniel said again, cocking his head, and Katya knew these would be his last words before shooting.

Filip hobbled, the only motion in the room. He slipped himself sideways in front of the girl.

‘You asked me if I can ride,’ he said over his shoulder to Josef, staring at the little mouth of Daniel’s gun.

‘No,’ the starosta said.

With that, Filip dragged himself in front of Josef. Behind him the old partisan flashed his pistol up. The girl screamed and Daniel fired. Josef’s gun roared, and for an exploding moment the two fired at each other across the barren room. Then Daniel crashed down, his chest dotted with three punctures. Filip fell next.

The gunfight outside the house broke off. Heavy steps pounded onto the porch. Big Ivan bolted into the room, his rifle ready. He stood dumb at what he found.

The girl had thrown up her hands in terror, still screaming. Josef let her loose. He knelt beside Filip. The elder croaked something with lifted head and fists balled in Josef’s coat. The girl stifled. Katya heard the starosta mutter, she caught only his brother’s name. Filip released Josef.

The old man sighed and sagged to the floor.

Josef did not pause. He leaped and came to Katya to take Leonid from her, hurrying the pilot out the door, past thunderstruck Ivan. Katya followed. The girl was left behind, rigid in her horror pose, staring without believing at Daniel, the dead traitor, her hero.

Katya shoved Ivan out the door. Leonid was already in a saddle.

Josef moved fast to get onto his own horse. Ivan lumbered to his mount.

Katya stared across the wide steppe, at the two dust clouds roiling behind the hiwi Nikolai and the escaping prisoner Breit, galloping away.

Katya flew into her saddle. Down the street a rifle snapped, a bullet whizzed past. All the riders kicked their horses and bolted. Katya saw how Leonid rode, not well and barely steady. Ivan stayed close beside him. The four riders lit out into the fields, the thud of rifles bit beneath their hoofbeats.

The hiwi and the German absconded in different directions, both away from Kazatskoe. Nikolai scurried back to his home village. Breit ran anywhere, away from the partisans, away from the village where the guards, his countrymen, were shooting at everything on horseback.

The guards fired after the partisans for seconds but hit none of them through the dust billows rising behind the horses. Katya kept her eyes on fading Nikolai and, farther to the north, Breit, doing his best to stay in the saddle.

She pulled alongside Josef.

‘Give me my pistol!’ she shouted.

Josef glanced past his bouncing shoulder at the receding village, at Filip. He reached into his waistband and took out her gun. He handed it over across the bounding neck of his own horse.

‘Go get the prisoner!’

Katya cut her eyes to Nikolai, then to Breit. She could catch either of them easily.

Josef shouted again, reading her expression.

‘We have orders, Witch! The German!’

‘No!’

Old dark Josef took one more look over his shoulder, to the little house where the brave starosta clutched him and spoke his last wish. He’d heard Filip’s last bloody whisper, the traitorous twin Nikolai’s name, and what else?

Katya turned to wheel her horse away Nikolai and Breit grew more distant by the second.

Josef looked out to Nikolai. There was no more time to choose between vendetta and his orders.

‘Go!’ Josef shouted. ‘I’ll deal with fucking Plokhoi. Go!’

‘Take care of Leonid! I’ll catch you!’

With that, Katya yanked Lana’s head around. The horse responded like a dzhigitka mount, digging in her hooves and whirling quick and nimble.

Katya clamped tight with her thighs and struck a furious pace straight at Nikolai. She tucked herself low over Lana’s lathering neck, clicking and urging the horse, ‘ Tick, tick, hiya!’ absorbing the pumping and pounding of the animal, swelling with it to do the murder that grew closer with every reach of Lana’s long strides.

Katya snared one last glimpse of the prisoner Breit off to her right.

The man was a terrible rider, he bounced like he was on a camel. She could have run circles around him. But as clumsy a horseman as the German was, he’d put enough distance between him and Katya speeding the other direction to disappear over a low rise in the steppe, and he was gone.

I hope you are a spy, Katya thought, matching her hips and arms to the rhythm of her sprinting horse. I hope you are and you go to Berlin and you help us. Or I hope your horse steps in a hole and you break your neck.

Go, Colonel Breit. Count your blessings.

Katya laid her eyes to the hiwi and galloped.

Nikolai saw her coming. He did his best to outrace her but he stood no chance with a Cossack in the coming saddle. Katya closed the distance and there was nothing the hiwi could do.

Filip is clan, Katya thought. He took me to Leonid, then he died to save us.

He is clan. This was his wish.

Nikolai, as though hearing her thoughts broadcast over the steppe, reined in his horse. The last hundred meters of grassland rushed beneath her. The pistol in her hand weighed nothing, it was the weight of the life she rode up to, the traitor. Nikolai lifted his hands, surrendering.

‘Witch,’ he pleaded.

Katya gave him no chance to say more. She stopped two meters away and raised the gun. She aimed it into his forehead, into the hawk-nosed face that was Filip’s. This angered her more, that Nikolai should have such a hero’s face. This hiwi would not profane that face any longer, and he would not take it with him to Hell. She pulled the trigger.

She circled the fallen body. She looked down, there was no question he was dead. She stuck the warm pistol in her waist and took the reins of Nikolai’s emptied horse, the partisans always needed extra mounts.

She sped off, eager to catch up to Leonid. Nikolai’s horse loped beside her. She bent low over Lana’s mane and let the blowing strands graze her cheeks. The reins felt good in her hands.

She’d killed a man today, a traitor, and attacked another, a German, trying to kill him, too. She spurred the horses away from the twin and the soldier, leaving their corpses well behind. She rode hard for several kilometers until she saw Josef, Ivan, and Leonid in the distance. They’d slowed. None of the enemy garrison from the village pursued them, the German war vehicles could not travel as fast over the roadless Russian steppe as horsemen. Leonid was too beaten to be taken anywhere but back to the partisan cell to rest and heal. Josef would tell Colonel Bad the prisoner Breit had been killed in the action, the German had tried to escape and paid for it. But she had come through. She’d saved Leonid. The spy in their cell, bastard Daniel, was exposed and handed the bill for his treachery, in front of his wife. Filip was old, and he died a memorable way, strong and selfless. A tear cooled in the wind against her cheek. Katya wanted to whoop out loud, a cry for Vera, for Filip.

Instead, she pulled the bandanna out of her hair and threw it away.

She tugged the reins of Nikolai’s mount to bring the horse closer alongside Lana. When the two horses were shoulder to shoulder, she pulled her boots from her stirrups, coiled her knees, and leaped to stand, one foot each on the two rocking saddles.

Like this Katya rode past Ivan, Josef, and Leonid. She rode with her bloody arms widespread into the vast and open day.

* * * *

DEATH RIDE

The armored clashes around Prokhorovka have attained almost legendary status as the greatest armored combat of World War II, and perhaps the greatest of all time.

David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House

The Battle of Kursk

The 5th Guards Tank Army delivered a frontal attack against crack German panzer divisions which, without an essential superiority in forces, could at best result in driving the enemy back. Since the Germans in turn were also assembling forces and were preparing to continue their ongoing offensive, a large tank battle was in prospect, which indeed, broke out during the day on 12 July.

Soviet General Staff Study

The Battle for Kursk, 1943

… Citadel was to be a veritable death ride.

Major General F. W. von Mellenthin

Panzer Battles

* * * *

CHAPTER 22

July 10

1030hours

Hill 256.6

near Teterevino,

alongside the Prokhorovka road

Luis drummed his fingers on the warm metal of the turret. His tapping made no sound he could hear above the thrum of the Tiger’s idling engine.

For minutes he’d been watching the motorcycle courier course from the west across the steppe. On the western approaches to Prokhorovka, Leibstandarte’s tanks and grenadiers were finally outside the deep defense works of the Soviets. These fields were untrammeled, a fresh, undulating table without the gargantuan grazes of tank ditches, bunkers, and trenches that marred the lanes to Oboyan.

Luis watched the motorcycle. He grew bored waiting. From his vantage on this hill, he noted how the land fell away to the north, sloping into shallow valleys that shaped the basin of the Psel River. In the eastern distance, close to Prokhorovka, he glimpsed patches of yellow, swaths of sunflowers, vibrant and misfit on this cloudy day.

The motorcycle skidded closer. Luis climbed out of the turret to receive the message standing high on the Tiger. He would not hop down into the mud. He looked at his watch. Damn Totenkopf, he thought. They should have taken their objective hours ago. He turned away from the sputtering motorcycle to face north, where Totenkopf struggled to cross a bend in the Psel River and overrun a key hill. The Reds were putting up a tough defense in the many small settlements along the riverbank. The sounds of the fighting crackled up from the river basin under a smoky shroud in the hazy late morning. Totenkopf was held up on the left flank: This delayed the start of the assault by the other two divisions south of the river, Das Reich and Leibstandarte. Luis again traveled in his mind back to the dark map room, imagining the long poles waiting to push the three SS

blocks eastward. He stood on his tank, idling with the Tiger under his boots and the long poles in his head. The motorcycle rider slid closer in the muck until he rode beneath the fat barrel of the main gun.

Luis leaned down for the message, a yellow sheet folded and taped over. The courier was spattered with mud. The soldier did not wait for Luis to read the note but gunned his throttle and puttered off, spraying the Tiger.

Luis read the two lines of the message. The attack was to resume at 1045 hours. The objectives for his division were to clean out Komsomolets state farm on the Prokhorovka road, then capture Hill 241.6, just east of the town. Totenkopf couldn’t be waited on any longer.

He stayed on the shuddering deck alone for another minute, surveying the battlefield. Far to his left flowed the Psel. On the right ran the Prokhorovka road and a parallel railway mound. In between was this long stretch of steppe, an alley about five kilometers wide.

This attack had three prongs: Totenkopf to the north across the river, Das Reich in the south below the road and rail tracks, and Leibstandarte in the middle. The other two divisions had more tanks: Das Reich possessed almost seventy tanks, Totenkopf over eighty. But theirs were mostly the impotent Mark IIIs. Das Reich was left with a dozen and a half Mark IVs and only one Tiger; Totenkopf had two dozen Mark IVs and just two Tigers.

Leibstandarte operated sixty-seven tanks, forty-one of them Mark IVs, and four Tigers. Even though Leibstandarte had not fully regrouped after its pivot away from Oboyan, it was still the most potent of the three SS

divisions. So it was the force chosen to go up the gut in the onslaught on Prokhorovka.

The mission for Leibstandarte was a simple one: Lead the charge to Prokhorovka, and crush everything in the way. Totenkopf was already encountering running battles in and out of the small farm villages and river lowlands. In another fifteen minutes when the full attack started, Das Reich would have to charge ahead on the other side of the road and rail line, through scattered forests and rolling knolls where the Reds could duck and counter-punch. Leibstandarte in the middle stared across a mostly level plain where visibility would be exceptional, where enemies would face little but each other. Luis thought of a bullring, where nothing separated the combatants but their wills to kill and survive. He fingered the hilt of the SS

knife at his belt. He searched again for the partisan’s pulse in his hand and found it. He turned to the turret, to the raised hatch cover for the mark of Erich Thoma and found it, too, brown and flaking, no longer blood but like the partisan, a memory of blood.

The fourteen tanks of his company began to jerk forward, firming into their wedges and positions around him, dustless over the damp earth. His own driver waited for his command. The long poles in the faraway map room waited, too. The sunflowers in the gray distance beyond Komsomolets farm called to him. Luis had always liked sunflowers, a very Spanish bloom, evoking long hot days and idleness.

‘ He llegado,’ he spoke to the Red fighters, the angry host standing hard between him and the sunflowers’ gold. I have come. I have come for the honor of the Blue Division. I have come for my father and for Spain. I have come for the lost parts of me. Soy la Daga.

* * * *

July 10

1125 hours

The first seconds of the assault stunned him. Cropland and grasses as far as Luis could see, which had been swaying in the dreary wind moments before, now rose together and advanced. Twenty thousand men and weapons, three hundred revving tanks and assault guns, all stirred at once, as though the plates of the earth had shifted; the ground itself seemed to slide forward. The gray-clad grenadier regiments of the three SS divisions put their guns in their hands and their boots into the soil and river and stomped east, over the tracks, across the florid flat steppe. Then came the first flights of air cover. The Luftwaffe’s Henschel 129s droned in slow and wicked, searching for targets in the fields and villages ahead, and above them the sirens of the diving Stukas began to whine in powered dives.

There was inconceivable German power concentrated here. The world tilted east at the Russians and Luis urged his Tiger to join the rolling crest.

He wondered what the Reds could do to stop them. He unwrapped a packet of crackers and chewed, almost too excited to swallow; he had to guzzle from his canteen to get the crackers down.

The first answering cannonade whistled in from across the Psel.

Damn Totenkopf, Luis thought again, they can’t even keep the Reds busy enough in their own sector to stop them from firing at us south of the river.

The rounds landed wildly among his panzers, striking nothing but damp ground and flinging muddy clumps. Luis did not batten down his hatch. He kept his eyes on the dark ten thousands walking and riding around him into the Russian defenders of Komsomolets. He was not impatient or jealous that these others came along, too. He was not afraid he would die today. He laid his hands on the quivering, creeping Tiger. Men and machines kept pace around the tank, believing in this machine as a salvation. Balthasar and the hidden crew waited for his order, and then whoever he chose would die instead of him.

In the next second a hundred reasons for doubting the magic of his life tore through the sky from the north. Like locusts came a screeching mass of rockets, Katyushas, the feared Stalin organs. The missiles rode on comet tails against the charcoal daylight and ripped into the Leibstandarte lines. The explosions pounded on the earth in fantastic rhythm, one boom scarcely separated from the next. The rockets pelted with the speed of a wild heartbeat, and the panzergrenadiers could leap neither left nor right under them but only fall to their bellies where they were and cover their ears. Luis ordered the driver to stop under the hail, soldiers were sprawled in the Tiger’s path. He ducked in the hatch, listening to the Valkyrie screams of the rockets. A few eruptions came close to his Tiger. The Katyushas were not precision weapons. They were designed to sow havoc and fear, but they could kill what they hit. He stayed low in the fuselage until the last rocket fell. His loader cast him a bemused grin across the giant breech.

‘Raining, Captain?’

Luis felt no friendship for these men in his crew. They were his tools.

But he’d never been one to let his banderillas grow dull or rusty, the spikes were sharpened before every corrida. He smiled for the loader although he did not try to remember the boy’s name.

‘I don’t think they make umbrellas for this kind of rain.’

The loader chuckled, making a show of approval for the remark. That was witty, Luis thought, I made a funny comment. He was pleased with his show of humor, something he used to have in his command of men when he was the Spaniard.

He stood. The Soviet rockets had shot their bolt and the grenadiers were on their feet and moving again. Luis ordered the driver forward. The plain was not cratered much by the Katyushas, the missiles were more frightening than effective. Only one soldier did not rise to join the advance.

Luis rode past the body and felt nothing. This wasn’t the time to take stock of his remaining humanity. The Tiger lumbered forward, men walking beside him and standing in other turrets looked up at him; the last thing they wanted from this Tiger tank’s commander right now was introspection.

A Henschel ground-attack plane drove low across his regiment’s line.

The pilot tossed out a purple smoke grenade. The canister hit the ground and raised an oily, pastel stink. Luis curled his nostrils and focused on where he was. The signal meant one thing. Tanks.

He hoisted his field glasses toward Komsomolets, five kilometers ahead now. The clot of structures was a state farm; several grain silos and claret-painted outbuildings were clustered beside the Prokhorovka road and rail mound. A swarm of T-34s raced out from behind cover. He estimated a hundred Soviet tanks burst across the fields, fanning to the left in a flanking action. Sturmovik fighters scorched out behind them. The Luftwaffe planes powered into this Red air cover and they struck up their customary tangled dances overhead. The SS tanks halted. Luis picked his first dashing targets through the binoculars while the Russians were still at the disadvantage of distance. By the time the Reds came close enough to become worrisome, he was certain Balthasar would have a half dozen of them in bits.

Balthasar spoke in the intercom, he had a target. Luis gave him permission to fire. The tank bucked around Luis when the cannon let go.

The other three Tigers in the panzer regiment bayed at almost the same moment. In the following seconds, two dozen assault guns and self-propelled tank destroyers joined in. Two kilometers away, the first towers of smoke and steppe drifted into the air among the charging Red tanks. Luis stood in the turret, bracing himself against every blast from Balthasar’s long barrel, wiping his goggles after each of the gunner’s shots.

Balthasar and his loader worked as fast as Luis could give them instructions. Their readiness with another shell and firing solution flowed in tempo with the battle beginning to swirl in the fields. Luis held on tight and between rounds ordered the Tiger forward in careful steps, to keep up with the running grenadiers but not to shorten the distance to the rushing T-34s any quicker than he had to. When Balthasar had a target acquired, Luis stopped to let him fire, put his hands over his helmeted ears, then crept ahead in pace with the infantry. The radio operator transmitted Luis’s commands to the rest of the company, for his platoon to stay in wedge formation around his Tiger, and for the other three platoons of Mark IVs to swing into an echelon left position to protect the flank from T-34s coming in wide from the north. More artillery cascaded in from across the Psel, and another barrage of Katyushas stymied the advance for a minute, driving Luis back inside the Tiger, drawing more mirth from his sweaty crew.

Nothing about the Soviet counterstroke impressed Luis, not even their numbers and the will to squander them. Without their network of trenches and solid defenseworks, the Red infantry were routed swiftly out of foxholes. Anti-tank guns were abandoned, damaged T-34s were left with their motors running, prisoners came out of the haze with empty hands high. Leibstandarte was outnumbered and outgunned in the grainfields in front of Komsomolets, as they had been on every battlefield since Citadel began. Even so, the Soviet resistance moved aside from Luis’s tanks like geese in the road. By noon, the first grenadiers had entered Komsomolets.

Twenty T-34s stood ruined on the steppe behind them, most killed by German tanks, a few blown up by grenadiers in close fighting. The rest of the Soviet force retreated east of the state farm to regroup behind Hill 241.6, to come in another wave later. Leibstandarte captured the farm and spent none of its own precious tanks, perhaps fifteen soldiers dead and fifty wounded. In the lull before grinding up Hill 241.6, while the grenadiers consolidated their hold on the farm buildings, Luis slipped his panzer company into the small forest next to the riddled silos. He crashed his Tiger and his Mark IVs into tree trunks, knocking them down with a careless pride, to make a place for his men and weapons to rest a little while. The green calm of the trees belied the havoc beside the Prokhorovka road. He ordered up ammunition and fuel, food and cigarettes for his tankers. He accepted a mound of mashed potatoes on a plate topped with a warm brown gruel and ate only a quarter of it. Strolling to the edge of the copse, he looked two kilometers east, up the gradual incline of Hill 241.6, the next objective on the road to Prokhorovka.

This is the soldier’s discipline, he thought. Do the job at hand, nothing more, then wait for orders to do another. But he believed he was here in this battle for a reason beyond the others, the grimy tankers and dirty plodding infantrymen, half-deaf artillerymen, crazy pilots, even the fat generals and their pretty staffs. Luis, alone of them all across every horizon today, knew there was no battle for Kursk, there was no Citadel. Those were only labels that would live in history books. No man lives on a page, he lives in his minutes and his skin. Whatever kingdom Germany or Russia carved out of this bloodied land would not survive, none ever has and none ever will, power is transitory, dominion becomes printer’s ink and dust.

Nothing outlives a man, not a crown, not a conquest, nothing but a name and honor. It is better to be honored than to be a king. Luis crossed himself there on the edge of the woods, it felt like he was praying, and he thought of Jesus, who was not a king, he thought of his own father, who had outlived many bulls and recalled all the best of them. He thought of Thoma who’d died so stupidly, all his honor trickled out. He smiled at the Russians on Hill 241.6, because he was sent here out of the many thousands to become great.

He turned and looked down the line of his fourteen tanks, at all the pushed-down trees and bared roots. Men sat on the prone trunks eating rations, fuel trucks delivered drums of gasoline, more shells were loaded by bare-chested soldiers. He stood before them and they were oblivious to his gaze, as they should be. They were invisible to history. Anything these men and tanks did belonged to him, their names would make a stack to lift his own.

Luis was in a fine mood. He chuckled at the sight and sound of the little motorcycle coming again to bring him a message. The bike with its toy spitting engine seemed funny beside Luis’s goliaths, the motorcycle dodged the trees his company had knocked over. The courier again found Luis and pip-pip-ed to him, holding out a yellow note. Luis gazed after the rider sliding away, and wondered if that rider would tell his grandchildren one day that at Kursk he was a delivery boy to la Daga.

Luis read the note. The attack on Hill 241.6 was to start at 1300

hours. Totenkopf had not yet crossed the Psel. South of the rail mound, Das Reich was barely keeping up with Leibstandarte’s forward units.

Nonetheless, Leibstandarte was ordered to plunge ahead and take the hill.

Again, Luis thought, I am at the knife’s point of the battle. He folded the note into his pocket and walked to stand near his massive Tiger, to be seen with it, linked to it always by those who would tell later of these fiery days.

At the assigned moment, his company roared out of the forest beside Komsomolets farm. Luis ordered all tank commanders to exit the copse with hatches down and secured. Within seconds of leaving cover, the Soviet artillery opened up on them. He shouted a command into the radio for his company to scatter by platoon and provide support for the advancing grenadiers. ‘Come left!’ he called to his driver. There was no way to motor straight up the slope, the defense was too withering. He stared into his optics, straining to find a target but so much earth was suspended in the air from the artillery lavished down on them he couldn’t pick out anything that resembled a Russian tank. Balthasar had his hand poised on his flywheel to respond the moment Luis called him into a shot. The loader squatted on his stool with a shell across his lap, ever faithful to the always-hungry breech.

For thirty minutes Luis yanked his Tiger and his Mark IVs back and forth along the base of the long hill. The Russians on the high ground did not spare their ammunition, and he kept his tanks running and difficult to hit.

Balthasar did not fire a round, but the Tiger crept among the grenadiers, waiting, prowling for a prey. None presented itself, and Luis would not fire blindly at the crest of the hill, that was the job for his own artillery. He was a tank hunter. The Reds would oblige him if he was patient.

By 1400 hours the grenadiers had slogged only a hundred meters up the grade of Hill 241.6. His company skulked alongside them, still without the Soviet armor offering itself for an open fight. Gazing out his periscope, Luis saw the first globs of rain splash on the deck. Thunder added its voice to the growl of his Tiger’s massive engine and the cracking rumble of cannon fire. This weather takes care of the air cover, Luis thought. A slow approach had just become slower.

The Tiger jolted. Luis snapped back from the brow pad of his optics, Balthasar below him recoiled as if hit in the jaw. Luis’s ears rang even under his padded helmet and headphones. He darted his eyes about the tank compartment; everything was intact. Balthasar shook his head and rammed his eyes back into his range finder. Luis did the same. His vision was blocked by a lick of flame and billowing smoke. A Red shell had smacked his Tiger on the nose. Luis ordered the driver to stop. As long as the Reds were coming straight for him, the Tiger’s armor could stand up to anything they threw. He wanted a clear, still look at what had shot him.

The smoke wafted away. Under a beaded curtain of rain, he spotted ranks of Soviet tanks in two, three, four rows powering down the hill. The Russians always attacked in waves. The T-34s rolled down in another hundred, as though that were their smallest integer. They were speedy, better in the mud than the heavy Tiger, even quicker than the Mark IVs. The panzer grenadiers greeted the Red tanks with anti-tank fire that knocked out a quarter of the first echelon in the initial minute of the charge. Balthasar, unleashed, stomped on the firing pedal again and again. Luis gave orders with his eyes glued to his commander’s optics.

The Russians stayed at a distance and Luis’s company parried, toiling forward only slightly, trading shots. Luis held his panzers back; why charge into a charge and lose every advantage? The Reds had superior numbers, and after another hour of tumult, when the first tank assault was beaten back, a second torrent came down the hill. Luis had days ago stopped being dumbfounded at the multitudes the Soviets tossed into battle, but he shook his head at this. He followed his grenadiers through the clinging mud, keeping his fourteen tanks at a snail’s pace alongside them, answering the Red tanks, keeping them at bay. It would do no good for his company to mount the hill alone, they would not hold it against Red infantry; this was always the perversion of mobile armor, a machine was at its most vulnerable against a man.

The fighting on the incline of the hill dragged on through lightning and deepening muck. Twice more Luis’s Tiger took blows, all of them glancing and disconcerting but without damage. Three of his Mark IVs were knocked out. In the middle afternoon he ordered his company by platoon back to Komsomolets to refuel and rearm. Though he was famished and out of crackers he was also without fatigue. His little body could stay in this fray for hours more, his focus through the scope and his strength to command were untarnished by the intensity of the last five hours of battle. Balthasar wanted to stay when Luis gave the order to retreat to the trees, he had a T-34 in his sights. Luis let his gunner fire one more round. Balthasar missed.

The Tiger was the last to withdraw the two kilometers to cover. Field kitchens, fuel trucks, and a medic station waited under the dripping trees.

The thunderstorm had moved on, leaving dusk in its wake like a bruise. Hill 241.6 fell into German hands while Luis sat on a tree chewing bread. The sounds of fighting from the Psel finally began to rise from a point north of the river, where Totenkopf had at last established a bridgehead. Das Reich made progress south of the road in the forests and villages there.

Leibstandarte’s grenadiers dug into positions on top of the hill and between the slope and the rail tracks. All three SS divisions were inching forward to Prokhorovka.

Luis kept his company under the trees until 22.00 hours. He mounted his Tiger and rode out into a quiet field under a tufted, starless sky. His eleven remaining tanks moved abreast. They found no standing grass or grain to trample, every blade was flattened and scored by the day’s fighting or blown to bits in the bottom of craters. There were no German tanks or bodies. Salvage and burial: These were extra benefits of winning the ground. Luis did not bother to count the number of Red T-34s and lighter T-70S left in hulks in a variety of reposes. A graveyard eeriness swept past his lurching turret as though, in moving across today’s battlefield, he were motoring through some gray vision of his own future, one of wreckage.

At midnight Luis was on top of Hill 241.6. An intense humidity seeped out of the ground. His crew had stripped to their skivvies to try and sleep on a spread tarpaulin. Luis was finished conferring with the other company commanders over a lantern. The casualty report was light for Leibstandarte

, only twenty-six killed, one hundred and sixty-eight wounded, and three missing. Estimates indicated the division had smashed over fifty Red tanks.

The company commanders were informed that the two other SS divisions were both shy of their objectives on the left and right flanks. None of Totenkopf’s armor had crossed the Psel yet, and Das Reich had not fought any farther than Yasnaya Poliyana, five kilometers behind Leibstandarte, which remained at the leading edge of the assault. During this night, the rest of Leibstandarte’s force would complete its turn away from Oboyan and catch up, bringing the division to full strength. Hopefully the trailing regiments would be accompanied by more repaired tanks. This would allow the division to send a panzergrenadier regiment across the road and rail mound in the morning to assist Das Reich with its progress through the defended forests and villages there.

Luis stood over his snoring crew, white-skinned in their underwear in the clouded half-moon light. The four were curled like giant grubs brought out of the ground by the moisture, heaped at the feet of the Tiger. He had no urge to lie down among his men and rest. He would stay erect and private to ensure that any word spoken about him now or later would be spoken with awe.

Luis had no duty for several more hours. He was not sleepy, he snapped his fingers walking around his tank to burn off energy. The Tiger was armed and fueled, it, too, needed nothing. He climbed up on the deck and stood over the engine in the filtered moonlight, looking east from the hill’s summit. The next day’s objective was to advance another five kilometers up the Prokhorovka road, that black ribbon below dissolving into the night. The Reds out there were keeping their lights off, shifting their thousands in the dark. The first morning target will be another strategic high ground beside the road, Hill 252.2. Once that fell, his panzers would swing northwest and attack another state farm, Oktyabrski. It would be the following day, the twelfth of July, that would send Leibstandarte into Prokhorovka itself. That will be the day, Luis thought. He could not foretell what would happen, he did not have that power. But standing on his Tiger looking into the murky east, he felt certain of when.

He turned to look back at the alley between the Psel and the rail mound. A line of vehicle headlamps snaked his direction along the battered road. The late-arriving regiments of his division wouldn’t run with their lights on like that; if they did, there would be a hundred trucks and armored carriers and tanks, they’d light up the whole river valley. No, these were other vehicles, ones not accustomed to battlefields and the need to travel below notice.

Staff cars.

Luis watched them wend closer, he heard the fine engines of Mercedes sedans and the tinny pops of several motorcycles in retinue.

This was someone important coming.

The cars stopped and dodged potholes in the road. Luis folded his arms and stared. The sky was too low for there to be any risk to this little convoy of enemy bombers. The night brooded, a boxer awaiting the next bout. The column of cars and motorbikes slipped past Komsomolets state farm, heading straight for the base of Hill 241.6. There the column stopped.

A motorcycle split off from the convoy and came across the field. In a broken path - the rider may have seen Red bodies on the ground in his headlamps - it came up the hill. This motorcycle had a sidecar attached to it. Without concern for the noise he made or the sleeping soldiers sitting up from their ground cloths, the rider stopped at one of the Mark IVs in Luis’s company. He paused, then revved his little motor down the line to the rear of the Tiger.

‘Captain de Vega, sir?’

Luis stayed high on the Tiger. The light from the motorcycle spilled over him, he was spotlit.

‘What is it?’

‘Major Grimm would like a word with you, sir.’

Luis glanced down at his crew. Balthasar sat upright in his underclothes. The gunner elbowed the radioman, who elbowed the loader and the driver. All watched.

Luis jumped off the Tiger and landed like a cat. He strode to the sidecar without a word and climbed in. The courier whisked him away in a sharp turn, the headlamp swept in a circle across many white faces turned his way.

The motorcycle caromed down the hillside, avoiding lifeless Soviet tanks, craters, and gloomy lumps that had been men. At the bottom of the hill, the row of vehicles had shut down to wait inside the night. Major Grimm had come all the way up from Belgorod to see Luis, over thirty miles of battered road and ground, with six vehicles attending him, twenty armed men. Why?

The courier halted next to a long black Mercedes. Luis rose out of the sidecar. A Wehrmacht private opened the rear door of the Mercedes. The courier pulled the motorcycle a few meters away and cut his engine. Luis folded and got into the car.

He chose the open seat, the bench facing the rear. On the opposite long seat was a heavy man mopping his brow.

Luis inclined his head. ‘Major.’

‘Captain de Vega.’ Grimm spoke, lowering his kerchief for a moment.

He looked out the car window at the dim silhouettes of Soviet tanks across the slope.

The major said, ‘You’ve been doing well, Captain. We’ve pushed your block quite a ways in the past five days. Now you’re on your way to Prokhorovka. Then Kursk, we hope.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Luis was not glad to see Grimm, even with his constant affability. What did the major want? Grimm knitted flabby fingers in his lap to keep himself from tapping on his knees.

The major said, ‘I thought I owed you a visit.’

‘Thank you, Major.’

Grimm swiped his kerchief under his bullfrog neck. ‘Captain.’

‘Yes, Major.’

‘You have performed well. First you defended the Tigers against the partisans. Then you served Colonel Breit and myself capably in the situation room. And you have done splendidly in the field. You know this.’