Last Citadel

May 10, 1943 1440 hours Reichs Chancellory Berlin, Germany

The SS colonel eased shut the high, heavy door. The portal closed with a hiss and a soft tap. How many trees went into this, he wondered, lives sacrificed out of the forest to make one of Hitler’s castle gates? The black eagle emblem of wartime hung at eye level against the carved wood. Colonel Abram Breit imagined this symbol of the Reich to be a spread-winged vulture. That’s what he left behind in the briefing room – a death scene, a picking apart, sinew by vessel, of Germany.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The buzzards flew from their perches then.

Field Marshal von Kluge spoke first, flapping to the table and sweeping a hand in the air over the foreboding maps. We will crush these pitiful defenses, the Field Marshal vowed, speaking in bald propagandistic phrases, the kind Hitler loved to hear. German ground forces have always penetrated enemy defenses and will do so in this case. Besides, look at the technological advantages we have, mein Führer. Look at our new tanks. Our Panthers and Tigers. Our tanks will make the difference, without fail.

Colonel Abram Breit had been brought to Berlin and was in the room to speak to this question of what impact the superior German armor would have on Citadel. Breit was the intelligence officer for the 1st SS Panzergrenadier Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. His division was to be in the vanguard of the Citadel assault. Leibstandarte would enter the fight with thirteen of the new Tiger tanks. It was his job to predict how the battle would go. After von Kluge spoke, Hitler glanced at Breit.

Field Marshal von Manstein, the man whose proposals gave birth to Citadel, replaced von Kluge at the map table. Hitler smiled over at Breit. This was when Breit saw deeply into Hitler’s eyes, when Hitler with a look apologized for skipping over Breit. They were the eyes, he realized, of an ill man. Hitler’s physician had been treating him for constipation, prescribing ever more powerful laxatives. Hitler’s eyes were lusterless, their striking blue was clouded. The Field Marshal began his comments. He said we may have waited too long. The Reds are getting ready for us. We should have attacked them in April, just after the spring thaw, the Russian rasputitsa. Breit watched Hitler agree, the dull eyes growing duller in disappointment and pain. Hitler did not know what to do. He slumped beside the great table where Germany lay and watched his visions of conquest and empire be pecked at by his commanders, who could not agree. His puffy face nodded; his chin sagged to his chest.

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

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

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

‘Captain Thoma.’

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

‘What do you think, Colonel?’ Thoma asked. The captain had been invited to the conference to speak to the training progress of the SS tankers in their new Tiger Mark VIs. Thoma, too, had been ignored by the generals during the meeting, left to stand aside as some kind of statuary, an example for Hitler of how attractive Germany’s soldiers were.

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

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

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

‘Do we?’

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

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

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

Thoma tossed his cigarette to the polished floor and ground it out, careless and again very young. ‘We have the tanks, Colonel. The Tigers. I’ve been training with them for the last five months. My men and I are more than ready. The Tiger can beat any tank it meets on any battlefield. Sir.’

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

‘One Tiger is worth a hundred Red tanks.’

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

‘Yes. Absolutely’

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

‘What about the new Panther tanks?’

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

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

‘The Americans are going to land on the Continent, Captain Thoma. We don’t know when but it will be in Italy and it will be this summer. That would be a very bad thing if we don’t have enough forces there to hold them off.’

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

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

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

‘Why, Captain?’

‘Because this is our time.’

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

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

Time for Germany’s doom.

May 11 1210 hours Old National Gallery Berlin

The Impressionists room was often crowded at lunchtime. The more beautiful the weather, the more Berliners strolled for their midday break. The Americans and the British did not bomb on perfect spring afternoons. The Yanks did their work only in the mornings, and the Brits raided at night. So far, they’d mainly contented themselves with wrecking the areas in north Berlin, the manufacturing districts. Downtown remained the nerve center for running the Nazi state, for parks and museums, and the myth of German survival.

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

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

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

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

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

No more.

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

The war had cost Breit his love of the Impressionists. Those painters had become bourgeois, coveted by the well-to-do, sold for large sums, even during their lifetimes. Their groundbreaking work – softening the image, the destruction of age-old realism – had fallen headlong into the mainstream. Monet, Manet, Renoir, Seurat – these weren’t the names of painters any longer so much as they were investments, portfolios for the Jews and others to hedge their bets during the war, hide their money in something other than currency no different than gems or gold bars. Breit cared only for one Impressionist now, the crazy Dutchman van Gogh, who never while alive sold one painting. Van Gogh, of all the Impressionist masters, was untouched, left alone with that madness that had become his vision. Breit preferred the Cubists, the artists who had moved away from the emotion and decorative symbolism of Impressionism. The Cubists – Picasso and Braque among them, who were put on their path first by the prophetic work of Cezanne – reconstructed the form on the canvas out of its base geometric elements, the spheres, cones, cylinders, and boxes of every object. These were egalitarian ideals, to break man’s world into simple patterns, into every man’s vision, mad or genius or gifted or not, even Abram Breit’s.

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

He remained a silent man. There was nothing he could do about his nature. But he could do with his life what the Cubists had done with the image, break his nature into its basic elements and take a clean look. So Breit did this, slowly, with the small brush strokes he never could muster with his hands, but could with his mind. In the mirror, in his tailored SS uniform, he began to see what he was made of. He shuddered to find so much reluctance and cowardice. Abram Breit faced the fact that he’d turned into a man he’d never wanted to become; he was not an artist, not a teacher anymore, not an individual at all. He wore SS black, the absence of all color. Abram Breit had become so silent a man that he was gone. His cowardice had erased him.

Breit was aroused for more truth. Yes, he’d been a coward. And what had been the canvas for his cowardice? He looked outside his window, into battered Berlin, across Europe, to the Balkans, into Russia. There he saw Germany’s fear and vanity. Undisguised, plain as paint and framed in flame, Breit grasped Hitler’s madness and genius – genius is madness, in a way – the driving forces behind the war, a global conflict made by Breit’s country and people; but Hitler’s madness was not like van Gogh’s. The Führer had grown openly corrupted by power, by the saluting hordes and goose-stepping world risen around him. Hitler had men on all sides who were devious for their own gains. Germany was in the wrong hands. That, like a sphere, a cone, a circle, a square, was an elemental truth. No man was so silent he could turn away from this.

First, Breit requested a transfer from the art archives to military intelligence. Most of his cataloging work was concluded; the flow of confiscated art had slowed as Germany became judenfrei. Leibstandarte granted his request. In late 1942, Breit trained for three months in Munich. Then he was assigned back to Berlin, as divisional liaison to Hitler’s staff. The Führer himself made the request, delighted with the artwork Colonel Abram Breit had selected for his chalets and castles.

Abram Breit became a spy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 28 1430 hours Vladimiriovka, USSR

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

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

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

Oh well, he thought, I’ll keep having fun even without the screams. Looking out through the hatch, he saw the whole company had gathered to watch his antics, the way Dimitri could make a tank shudder and dance, spin, and even run in place to dig its way down into a trench. They should see me on a horse, Dimitri thought. Next to an old Cossack on a horse, this tank, this machine, is nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crowd went quiet.

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

Dimitri spoke first.

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

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

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

‘Who is that?’

The sergeant kept his voice low, as well.

‘It’s Babadzhanian.’

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

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

‘Slap me.’

The sergeant bristled at this.

‘I will not.’

‘I was insolent. Slap me now.’

‘No. It’s against regulations.’

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

The sergeant held still. ‘No.’

‘Your mother was a whore.’

‘I know.’

‘You should have been drowned at birth.’

‘I know.’

‘Then slap me.’

Dimitri shuffled his heels in the torn-up earth. This was taking too long. Many more seconds and the colonel himself would stride forward to mete out regimental justice. Dimitri gritted his teeth.

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

‘Your promise.’

‘What, to be good?’

‘Yes.’

Dimitri hesitated.

‘For how long?’

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

‘Alright,’ Dimitri said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dimitri ran the several steps to the tank. The green-painted metal was warm under the summer sun, filthy with flung dirt. With practiced ease and agility beyond his fifty-five years, he lifted himself and swung his legs through the hatch, settling into his seat. With swift hands he flicked the ignition switch and hit the starter. The diesel engine coughed and fired. Dimitri pulled down his goggles and gripped the twin levers. This was the third tank he and Valya had been given. In the last year they’d had two shot out from under them, one in the pocket outside Stalingrad in the winter, one more in the lost battle for Khar’kov three months ago. With their tanks went two crews; twice, he and Valya had been the only ones to escape. Four dead, all the hull machine-gunners and loaders. And when you die inside a tank, you always die ugly. Dimitri looked around the compact room of the T-34, designed for battle, not comfort. Metal everywhere, and where there was not steel there were glass gauges. When the armor gets pierced by a shell, the compartment turns into a razor storm, a pit of flame, a gas chamber, any number of things that will kill you faster than a blink. Dimitri permitted himself a wistful second, recalling what he had seen inside these tanks. When will the luck run out for him? And Valya?

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

‘Private.’

‘Yes, I know’

Dimitri grinned.

‘Valya,’ Dimitri said.

‘What?’

‘Next time don’t smack me so hard.’

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

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

June 28 1440 hours

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

The tank, one of the new T-34/76 1942s, responded well. The designers had added only a few improvements over the 1940 and 1941 models. The treads were slightly broader, reducing the ground pressure per square inch, letting the tank handle better. There was added armor on the turret face and sides. The hull gunner’s position had a protected mount now. The turret overhang was reduced to keep from reflecting incoming rounds down onto the turret ring. The big difference was the longer-barreled main gun for a higher muzzle velocity. Shells fired from this tank would penetrate far better than anything the Red Army had ever mounted. But it still might not be enough. Dimitri heard talk of the new German super-tanks, Tigers and Panthers with massive guns and the thickest armor ever seen on the battlefield. When the fighting starts again, those new beasts will be arrayed across the steppe from him. Again, he laughed at his own worries, and once Valentin let him off duty, he parked his own new beast under a tree. In the shade, he rose from his seat, tossing helmet and goggles to the grass. He slid down the glacis plate and stood stretching his back and stiff neck. He looked out over this land the Germans and Russians decided would be the stage for their apocalypse. Eternal swaths of reeds and grasses rolled in ripples of green and wheat. This was beautiful cavalry country, classic campaign terrain, where giants could fit all their killing wares at once and surge at one another, to clash eye to eye.

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

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

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

‘Alright, my lad,’ he said, standing with a soft grunt. He’d taken a shard in his right calf six months ago outside Stalingrad and never had it removed. Over his half century of fighting and carousing and galloping, he’d fallen off fifty horses and been kicked by a hundred. He’d pulled plows when the mules were starved in the collectivization years in the Kuban. His knuckles were scarred and knobby from farm machines, swords, jaws, guns, and now tanks. Dimitri opened his hands, then worked them into fists. His forearms bulged no less than they did thirty years ago when he was a rider for the Tsar. His nails were stained now with grease and not the loam of the farm or the lather of a war charger. He opened one thick hand and laid it across the tank’s fender. He walked all around the tank, touching it, reached up to the thick turret, cooler now for its time beneath the tree. He slid his fingers down the long green length of the main gun, at its open mouth remembering sugar cubes and carrots, knowing he must ride this beast toward death and having nothing in his pockets to give the machine to please it and bond it to him.

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

Dimitri walked to another tank crew and from them got a brush and a canister of white paint. Walking back he read the titles given to others of the newly minted T-34s: Motherland; Our Nation’s Defense; Stalin The Father. The commissars loved it when you dubbed your tank something like that. Dimitri would not sloganeer for the Communists. He was the driver. This tank was his to name. He returned to his clearing and climbed aboard. In minutes, on the port side of the turret, he scrawled in large letters the name of his previous two tanks, General Platov, the great Cossack warrior from the bloody war with Napoleon.

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

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

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

Dimitri dug his head into the engine compartment, looking over the heart of his new tank. And it was a good heart. The T-34’s motor made it the fastest tank on the field, always, with a top speed of thirty miles per hour. The engine was diesel, efficient, giving a range of up to 260 miles. And unlike the Germans’ gasoline-powered Mark III and IV tanks, the motor also lacked the troubling tendency to blow up in combat.

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

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

‘Another General Platov.’ Dimitri did not turn to the voice. Instead, he finished his chore. ‘Maybe this time the good General will have better luck. How many lives does a Cossack have, Private?’

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

Valentin stayed quiet for uncomfortable seconds. Then Valentin said, ‘It’s a bad thing when a son has to slap his father.’

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

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

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

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

‘Good,’ he said.

‘I think so,’ Dimitri agreed.

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

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

‘You’re soft,’ he told his son.

‘I follow orders.’

‘You follow Communists.’

‘Stalin’s winning the war.’

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

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

‘And I want to have it again.’

‘I’m not going to fight with you.’

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

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

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

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

‘In a few days, I’m told.’

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

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

‘My mother was a saint.’

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

‘Yes, she was,’ Dimitri answered.

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

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

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

June 28 2315 hours

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

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

He walked past the four tanks of his platoon, then down the line of the twelve T-34s in his company. He lit a cigarette, strolling, trailing gray haze. Hushed voices rose in the twilight. ‘Dima, can’t sleep?’ ‘Not nervous, are you, old man?’ Dimitri waved the dot of his cigarette at the good-natured taunts from under the tarpaulins, he moved through the thicket of youthful snores in the macabre light. There were forty-five tanks in his battalion, all of them parked in four rows. He walked until the signal flare went off.

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

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

When he reached the General, Valentin was already standing in place behind his open hatch door. Dimitri was the last driver in their company to jump into his seat. Valentin said nothing while Dimitri cranked the engine. The tank shuddered and the diesel added its racket to the rumbling night.

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

‘Clear.’

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

Moments later, the tank in front of Dimitri pulled forward. He did not wait for Valentin’s order to fall in, but shifted to first gear and rolled ahead, allowing ten meters to grow between the General and the next tank, the correct amount of distance when traveling in column formation. He had no idea where they were going. Their destination was Valentin’s job, the commander’s job. Dimitri looked over his shoulder and up, to see his son. The boy was folded into his seat, a map spread over his lap, a small light glowing over his head. Dust and smoke flew in the night air, mixed with pollen and torn grasses. The column moved with their running lights off, to avoid being spotted by prowling enemy night bombers. Dimitri couldn’t see the tank in front of him, so he drove the General straight into the dirty cloud that was its wake.

The column turned south. They stayed west of the Belgorod-Oboyan road, tramping up and down the rolling plain. They’d come this way five days ago, to stop at a narrow branch of the Solotino outside the village of Novoselovka. The first T-34 to cross the river bridge had cracked through the pilings and crashed on its side in the shallow water in a magnificent splash. Its crew broke some bones and the march was halted. Engineers were called up to make the bridge secure, something that should have been done weeks ago but someone missed it. Tonight, the column of tanks roared across the little span without incident. Jolting over the new-timbers, Dimitri wondered if that lead tank was still tilted beneath him in the water. Probably, he decided. But there are no kids playing on it during the daylight. The entire area along the bulge of the 250-mile-long front line had been evacuated and turned into a fortress. Every bridge was mined, a thousand of them. Every solid house of every village had a machine-gun in a window. Roaring out of Novoselovka, Dimitri could not see one light in any dwelling, not one cow or chicken along the road. Where there are no chickens, he realized, there are no Russians.

The column moved without break for two hours, coursing south over fields parallel to the Oboyan road. In that time, Valentin did not speak, but studied his maps in his command position. This was the son he had raised. A map reader, following the terrain on a sheet of paper instead of by the stars and landmarks. Dimitri’s father, Konstantin, could not read a word, let alone decipher a military map. But the old man and his horse were never lost, not on weeklong hunting trips, not when he rode across these same steppe lands beside his own son, galloping under a raised saber and the white flag of Nicholas against the tightening rule of the Communists. Konstantin had taught Dimitri how to ride the earth like a horse, follow its movements, keep himself in its stirrups. Now Dimitri listened to the soft hum of nothing in his earpieces, from a silent son and commander. Dimitri had not taught the boy well. His old father would be angry.

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

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

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

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

The dozen commanders in his company clustered around a captain. Dimitri walked away from the settling fumes and heat of the tanks, a little ways into the surrounding field.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well, there’s hope, then!’

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

‘You, too, goatherder.’

Andrei returned to his tank. Dimitri flicked away his cigarette. He put his hands on his hips and leaned his head back into the cascading moonlight. He knew how the rest of the night and morning would go. Andrei was right, this was going to be their main defense region. Their battalion, all fifty tanks, would dig ditches deep enough for them to roll the T-34s into, hull down, so only the turrets were exposed. They’d dig shelters for ammunition, later in the day the shells would be brought up and stacked. There would be practice in camouflage and target acquisition. They’d drive over the plain and mark march routes for wetlands and boggy patches, they’d ease past minefields and mark them, too. They’d identify lanes of retreat should the Germans push them back from this second defense line to the third and final belt in front of Novoselovka, the last stand before Oboyan and Kursk. The generals would let German spotter planes photograph them here, let them report to their own command how the Russians have occupied this fork on the Oboyan road. Then tomorrow night, after the T-34s had gone, engineers would build maskirovka tanks here out of barrels, hay, and poles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Night Witches,’ murmured Valentin.

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

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

June 28 2320 hours one thousand meters above Syrtsev ten miles north of the front line Voronezh Front

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

Below, the earth slid by, the color of cobwebs and ghosts, soaked in the full moon. Plumes of dust rose from the vast grasslands, the thin stalks were smashed flat in straight lines, the unmistakable sign of tank columns. These are our tanks, she thought. Hundreds of them, on night maneuvers.

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

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

‘Saying hi to your papa?’

‘Just in case he’s looking.’

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

‘How far?’ Katya asked.

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

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

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

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

Katya took a gulp of the warm night air rushing past her open cockpit. The U-2 engine pop-pop-ed and spit burps of blue flame from the exhaust ports. She mimicked the noise, popping her lips, bored with the straight flying and exhilarated by the thrill and danger of the mission, all at once. She released the stick and pulled her boots up into the seat. Katerina Dimitriyevna Berkovna stood, bending her knees to miss the upper wing and fuel tank, and stretched her arms wide.

Vera, with a duplicate set of controls in the rear cockpit, made sure the U-2 stayed even, not because she was worried about her pilot falling out, Katya knew, but because to deviate would disturb her calculations. Katya was trained from birth to stay in any saddle, on any horse, even a flying one. Now she sat down, feeling Vera’s hands release the stick to her.

‘One day,’ Vera spoke into the intercom.

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

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

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

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

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

Then Vera gave the order. ‘Cut engine.’

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

In the rear cockpit, Vera lit two parachute flares and cast them out. Katya banked left to watch the flares drift and lend their incandescence to the moon. The U-2 was down to thirty-five hundred feet now, low and mute enough for her to hear sirens blare below. She saw men run. Some dropped to their knees and fired, muzzles flashed on the ground, jittering under the swaying chutes. A spark struck against the engine cowling. Through the wind she heard a ping. A round had glanced off the motor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes!’

‘Tell me when!’

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

Katya gritted her teeth.

She hissed only, ‘When?’

‘Jesus, mother of God.’

‘When?’

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

‘Now!’

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

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

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

The bombs struck. She felt the first kick in her tail from the explosion. The U-2 increased its angle of climb, the engine’s bellow was lost in the roar of the ammunition dump below.

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

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

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

The upper wing there was also murky and smoking from the blast. She shifted to the lower wing.

‘Uh oh,’ she said.

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

She shouted to Vera, ‘Hold on!’

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

Vera said, ‘Well?’

‘Well what? Go get it!’

‘Me?’

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

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

‘Well, no.’

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

‘Why me?’

‘You’re the acrobat, Katya.’

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

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

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

‘Go.’

‘Hold it steady’

‘Go!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Katya.’

She looked down at the gray fields where the tanks had spread. Lanterns were lit, men were digging, the grumble and clank of tanks reached her even through the whine of her own engine.

‘Yes, Verushka.’

Vera laughed.

‘One day

June 29 0425 hours Kalinovka aerodrome

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

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

Katya brought the nose up, killed her speed, and settled the U-2 on the flattened grass. She taxied out of the way as soon as she was down, for the next plane in line behind her would be coming. This was how her 208th Night Bomber Division attacked and returned: one plane took off and flew straight at the target at a prescribed altitude, the next followed three minutes behind. After dropping their bombs, each pilot returned to base at a different altitude, landed, and was flung back into the air as soon as the plane was ready. The pilots and navigators drank coffee and huddled until the armorers and mechanics – all women in their Night Bombers Division – finished their work and gave the crews the thumbs-up, then they were off again. After the alarms and explosions set off on the first sortie, the Germans knew where the bombers would come from and when. The only way the women would survive was to cut engines and glide through the night, and this was why the Germans named them as they did: Night Witches.

The U-2 rumbled to a halt. Masha ran up as soon as the propeller slowed to chock the wheels. Vera was out of the cockpit and headed for her cot before Katya took her feet from the rudders and pulled down her filthy goggles. The plane shuddered to begin its day of recuperation, and in the raw silence Masha whistled. Katya glanced around her scorched U-2 from the vantage point of the cockpit, now lit by the tincture of sunlight rising above the tree line. The plane was blackened and shredded, tail to rotor. Bullet holes and shrapnel rips punctured the wings, there wasn’t a five-foot length anywhere without some hole and ragged cotton.

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

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

‘Yes.’

‘What’s the count so far?’

‘Thirty-two out. Twenty-two in.’

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

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

‘Ho, ho, calm down, Lieutenant!’

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

‘Good morning, wing-walker.’

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

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

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

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

‘She saved my life? Vera told you…?’

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

‘Get out!’

‘No. Finish your breakfast.’

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

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

Katya was qualified for the fighters. When she graduated from the paramilitary Osoaviakihm in Krasnodar eight years ago, she was tops in the class, of both girls and boys. A year later, when only twenty, she trained at the Khar’kov Flying School and in her first year became an instructor. Then she attended the Tula Advanced Flying School and graduated with colors. When the war broke out, she’d answered a nationwide call for the formation of women’s aviation regiments. She went to Moscow, was trained and tested more, and was certain of being assigned to a fighter assault division. Instead, she was made a night bomber, and there was no appeal.

She’d met Leonid the previous winter, in the fighting around Voroshilovgrad and the Terek River. He saw her standing by the airstrip during the day watching the Yaks come and go, made pleasant conversation in passing, then asked one day if she’d like to go up with him. He snuck her into the cockpit on an early morning and put her in his lap, sharing the safety harness. From that position she flew, blasting through the cold Crimean sky, spinning the Yak like a dervish until Leonid reached around and took the stick from her, shouting in her ear that he had to stop her, anyone watching would know it was not Leonid Lumanov flying, he couldn’t do some of those tricks.

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

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

Her 208th Night Bombers had been in combat now for nine months without stop, chasing the Germans westward after the massive Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February of that year. Their division had flown thousands of sorties, against hundreds of targets, in their cloth and wood trainers, in biting winter weather and broiling steppe heat, in open cockpits. Leonid had never been one of the scoffing male pilots, those who thought women had no place in the sky during combat. Katya and the Night Witches had nothing to prove to Leonid. He’d stood beside the runway enough times himself, counting the returning U-2s, watching for Katya, and done the sad math. One missing, two, sometimes three or more, smiling for Katya when there were none. He told her many times the male pilots had to peacock on the ground because they were no more brave than the women in the air, and they knew it.

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

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

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

‘Come on.’

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

‘Grab that bucket.’ She pointed to Leonid.

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

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

He dropped the bucket and did as he was told, shoving the propeller into ready position, where the starter could grab it and heave it into rotation. Katya shouted behind her, ‘Clear!’ and nodded at Leonid. He shoved down on the propeller. The magnetos whirred. The propeller flung itself over once, twice, then the engine caught with a spitting sigh of smoke. Katya sat in the jouncing cockpit, smiling down at Leonid, who stood hands on hips, a handsome, admiring young man.

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

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

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

‘He’s nice,’ Katya said.

‘You own him,’ answered Vera.

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

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

‘Yes,’ Vera said.

‘You know I have to refill that radiator.’

‘Yes, Mashinka.’

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

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

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

‘Yes, Mashinka.’

‘I mean it.’

‘We know.’

‘Use cold water.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leonid sat on a bucket, kicking out his ankles in a mimicry of the gopak, the Cossack dance. Masha rambled back and topped off the radiator without saying a word. The two women reclined in the sun. Around the base, planes fired up and shut down, some took off, bombers flew high overhead on some mission to worry the Germans before the coming battle. In the command hut, the next mission for the Witches was planned, the objectives often were arrived at by information from the partisans. After an hour of leisure, Leonid left them, then Vera went to write a letter. Katya stood beside her bi-plane, watching Leonid walk to his Yak-9 in his flight suit, watched him take off to fly his shift of patrol duty over the aerodrome. He waggled his wings as he rose, and she knew that was for her.

June 29 2345 hours thirteen hundred meters above no-man’s-land Voronezh Front

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, it’s quiet. Leave me alone.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s enough.’

Moments later, dead off the nose about six miles ahead, a small globe of orange pierced the night. This was the first sortie over the target. Within seconds, enemy searchlights like angry antennae began to wave in the air, looking for the gliding little plane somewhere over their heads, the Witch that had whisked down on them.

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

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

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

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

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

But where was the German flak?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Vera.’

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

‘Where are we? Focus!’

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

‘Vera, stay with me.’

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

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

Katya gripped the bomb release.

‘Now!’”

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

Katya banked left and dove hard for the ground. A searchlight brushed her starboard wings and that was enough for the night fighter. Above her own engine Katya caught the howl of the Messerschmidt zooming down. The searchlight was gone from her plane but the German pilot had a read now on the slow-moving U-2. Red tracers ripped beneath her, she pulled up from her dive, just missing driving straight into the bullets’ course. The hammer blows of the night fighter’s machine-guns cut through every other sound of the night, the engine, the wind, Vera’s curses, Katya’s pummeling heart. Then she heard the slower thumps of cannon fire, and she thought this was ridiculous, that the night fighter needed his 20 mm cannons to stop a plywood bi-plane. The Germans are serious; they want the Night Witches cleared from the sky. And the Russian women made it easy for them tonight, sailing in from one direction, at one altitude. The night fighter was feeding on them like a black shark.

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

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

‘No, he’s not. Get us home, Vera.’

Over her shoulder Katya caught the glow of Vera’s flashlight. The navigator was scrambling for her maps, gazing over the cockpit for landmarks now that the night fighter had chased them out of their prescribed track. That track, Katya thought. We’re going to have to change our tactics if this is how the Germans fight now. We were prepared for searchlights and flak, but not this. We’ve got no armor, no radios, no guns. She wished Leonid were here in his Yak-9, blasting back at the Messerschmidt. That would be a proper duel. Not this.

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

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

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

June 30 2150 hours Wehrmacht train moving east Treblinka, Poland

Luis Ruiz de Vega lifted a hand to snare the attention of a passing waiter. He waved his fingers over his plate, then made a sweeping motion to tell the man to take the dinner away.

‘Ja, mein Herr.’

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

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

He flipped the suspended hand over, examining his palm, then set it in his lap. In the way he’d awakened from his dream in Spanish, Luis awoke in his old form, strong and sinewy, five foot ten, the perfect physique for a man. It was the dark body that had earned him his renown, in the bullrings, then in the Civil War, next with Franco’s Blue Division, and finally with the SS at the Leningrad siege, his captain’s commission and his own company. The feats he could perform in that body earned him praise, women, and his nickname, la Daga. The Dagger. He raised the shrunken hand to his waist to finger the sheathed knife he wore on his belt, a ceremonial blade given to him by his division. On the blade was written the SS oath: Meine Ehre Heisst Treue. My honor is loyalty. Funny, Luis thought, smiling a wretched grin, the irony of things. Finally I have become la Daga. I could stick someone with these hands.

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

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

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

‘Still in Poland, I’m afraid.’

‘How far from the border?’

‘Not too far. Northeast of Warsaw.’

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

Luis looked back to the platform. An armed guard followed three emaciated men hauling a cart filled with the luggage of the debarking passengers. The skinny men wore blue-striped wool trousers and tunics. Their heads were shaven over vacant eyes. Water could have collected in the hollows of their cheeks.

‘What is this place?’

The major said, ‘Treblinka.’

‘A work camp?’

The major chose his words. ‘Of sorts.’

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

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

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

Then he took his bullet to the stomach, standing beside his tank, one of the lousy Mark IIIs, near Lake Ladoga. A Red sniper got him. As a teenager Luis had been gored by a bull, he’d guessed wrong and the bull accommodated his mistake – his father did not rush out to tend to him lying in the ring; the matador came last and not until the bull was bled and worn down, that was the rule, even for fathers – and the Russian bullet did not feel as bad. But Luis’s bleeding did not stop and he would die, that’s what the medic told him. He asked for a priest, but there were none to be brought to him. And so he faced God alone, and God reprieved him. He woke in a hospital three days after his surgery and began his recovery. He spent four months in that hospital and seven in another in Berlin learning about his new body and withered spirit. He found bit by bit that he’d become almost impervious to passion; that was left behind in the Spaniard he was. He must always have food with him, crackers, cheese, something to keep him going when the small reservoir of his stomach was empty. There was humiliation in this, it was a weakness, and Luis accepted it as his shame, and a small one as shames go. And this new body, with all it had gone through, the stitches and vomiting, so much of itself shearing away like melting ice, was almost unable to feel pain anymore. Luis, though rail thin, sensed he had become even more powerful than the distracted boy, the Spaniard, he once was.

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

Luis stood.

‘Taking a walk?’ the major asked.

‘Yes.’

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

The major rose and followed Luis down the narrow corridor and off the train. Stepping onto the platform, the waning day was tepid and bland. Polish weather, Luis thought, it makes for an indifferent history. This country has a tradition of being conquered. Luis walked quickly through the crowd, careful not to be bumped by any of the burly bustlers leaving or greeting the train.

He stopped with his back to the warm brick wall of the station. The major stood close, protective, reading Luis’s discomfort. Luis stared down the length of the train, twenty cars long. In the middle of the linkage were ten flatcars bearing brand-new Mark VI Tiger tanks. These were painted tan for the coming Kursk campaign, Operation Citadel. The tanks were marked for delivery to the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division on the southern flank of the Kursk bulge. The machines were behemoths, so broad their regular treads had to be removed and narrower transport tracks put on so they could fit on the train cars. The things were mighty-looking to Luis, they seemed proud and powerful like fresh, angry bulls. They were his to deliver to Leibstandarte. The Tigers were supposed to guarantee victory in Operation Citadel and turn the war around again for Germany. This was the third summer of campaigning in Russia. The Reds had not buckled as expected in the first year or two under the Blitzkrieg; in fact, they’d held and gone over to the offensive themselves after their big victory at Stalingrad. Even so, the question was never the superiority of the German forces or the power of the tools at Hitler’s command, like this Tiger under Luis’s protection. No. Germany would beat Russia if given the time, if a breakthrough could be won at Kursk. But the war had dragged on so long, the calendar might soon run out of pages for German destiny. Why?

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

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

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

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

‘Off to check on your Tigers, Captain?’

‘Yes.’

‘Quite the brutes, aren’t they?’

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

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

‘Once. I am in the SS now.’

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

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

The first cars behind the locomotive were filled with troops. Then came a dozen flatbeds, the first and last of them covered by green tarps. Luis strolled along the track to stop beside the first flatcar bearing a Tiger. Two SS guards facing him saluted with extended hands. He waved in the air, approximating the return salute. The two men gripped their machine pistols and went ramrod stiff until Luis and the major passed. The Tiger seemed impossibly huge up there on the flatbed, as though it might crush the supporting train wheels and platform. Luis had spent years fighting in the forerunners of this ultimate tank, the Mark IIIs and IVs. Those were toys, cap guns compared to this brute with its impenetrable armor and 88 mm gun. But the Tiger, like any weapon, had to be put in the proper hands. Luis had been la Daga, had once been those right hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 30 2220 hours

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

He unbuttoned his tunic, raised his arms and splashed water from the sink under his pits and over his shoulders. He stopped and looked at himself in the mirror. There were the dark eyes of Luis but where was the rest of him? That was his black hair spread across the reflected chest, but where was the muscle? Those ribs, like the naked spars of a boat. He stared at the figure in the mirror, the close walls of the train’s water closet rattled around him as the train bumped along. He cupped a handful of water, leaned over the sink, and played the water over his brow and jet hair. He gazed down into the white scoop of the china bowl, waiting a moment, then stood straight and looked in the mirror again. There he was, his image also the white of porcelain. He slicked his wet hair down and considered himself. He raised a hand to the mirror; the gaunt reflected man reached back and they touched. They spoke.

‘Lo jugue, y lo perdi.’

You played, and you lost.

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

‘Soy yo,’ they said.

It’s me.

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

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

‘Yes, it seems.’

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

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

He leaned forward to shake hands.

‘SS Captain Luis Ruiz de Vega.’

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

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

‘What division are you with, Captain?’

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

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

‘And you?’

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

Luis nodded. Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course.’

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

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

‘Alright,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An hour later, Ramon de Vega engaged his second bull, the final and the greatest of the six in that day’s corrida, and he was magnificent. He won the crowd again and was awarded two severed ears from the wonderfully dead bull. Circling the ring, Ramon held up the ears to the roaring crowd. Luis walked behind him gathering off the ruffled dirt the tossed roses, wineskins, hats, cigars, and ladies’ fans.

The year was 1934. Luis intensified his apprenticeship under his father, learning all the passes, and perfecting his courage as a banderillero. He would become the next generation of great matadors in the de Vega lineage. One day he came home and told his father his friends had come up with a nickname for him, The Dagger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Within five months of the Spanish Civil War’s end, Hitler invaded Poland. France and England declared war on Germany. Franco kept Spain neutral. Hitler came to Spain seeking repayment for the debt of blood won by his legions, his tanks and planes in Franco’s service during the Civil War. But the Generalissimo refused even to let German troops march across Spain to attack the British garrison in Gibraltar. After their conference, Hitler was quoted as saying, ‘I’d rather have three or four teeth out than meet that man again.’ Luis agreed with Franco; Spain had suffered enough in the previous three years. Over a half-million Spaniards had died fighting or by the executions. War had gorged on Spain, it was time to feed elsewhere. That place was to be Russia.

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

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

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

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

Then came his wound.

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

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

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

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

June 31 1010 hours a Luftwaffe JU-52 altitude fifty-seven hundred meters above Rakovo, Soviet Union over the German front lines

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

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

The photographer snapped pictures of the army on the staging zone below. He plugged his headphones into a jack in the fuselage beside him. Instantly his earphones came alive. He heard the pilot laughing at him.

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

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

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

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

He knew all the numbers: as an intelligence officer and a spy, information was his sole value. Germany had nearly a quarter million men on the southern front, spearheaded by a thousand tanks and self-propelled assault guns, thirty-five hundred artillery pieces and mortars. II SS Panzer Corps alone held thirty thousand men, 390 tanks, one hundred self-propelled assault guns. The bulk of the tanks manned by SS crews were Mark IIIs and IVs, with a smattering of captured and repainted Soviet T-34s. The SS divisions fielded no Panthers, and only forty-two Tigers. Abram Breit scanned the ground, slowly becoming oblivious to the discomfort of lying above the clouds on a pane of nothing. He envied the magnifying lens of the photographer’s camera, for it would bring him closer to the tiny forces so far below. Breit longed to catch sight of a Tiger tank; from what he’d heard of their gargantuan size, they ought to be visible even from up here. He saw a few wide paths in the dark loam of the steppe, considered they might be the tracks of Mark VIs, and thrilled a little. A new squeeze eddied in his chest, excitement.

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

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

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

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

‘Oh my God.’

The density of the Soviet defense works had been a startling thing to contemplate in Berlin when all Breit saw was facts and figures, intel photos, red blocks on broad map tables. He’d indicated the Red forces many times with long pointers, he’d moved them around like little game pieces. But this colossal network carved into the earth below him beggared his imagination. This was no game board.

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

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

Breit spoke into his microphone.

‘Pilot.’

The answer crackled. ‘Yes, sir.’

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

‘Yes, sir.’

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

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

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

Breit’s transfer to Citadel had been unexpected, his orders arrived in Berlin yesterday morning by motorcycle courier. This was a promotion, he was appointed intelligence officer for Leibstandarte at the front. He was far beyond art and paperwork now, thirty kilometers behind Russian lines. There’d been no time to arrange anything with his Lucy contacts to continue his espionage before he was transferred to Russia. Could he find a way to get in touch with his spy masters even here in the battle zone? Could they find him somehow? From the looks of things below, he’d already done plenty as it was. Perhaps too much? Breit was frightened. He wanted the defeat of Germany, yes. He was committed to this belief – he risked his life every day for it – that Hitler and the Nazis would lead Germany and much of the world to a bad end. But what else had he done by helping the Russians? Had he set the table for Germany’s annihilation? The battle that was shaping up below was going to be extraordinary likely the greatest land battle in all history. How much of Germany would survive it? Would he? Breit wanted a cigarette very much.

The pilot continued, ‘Oh, they want us to see this. As much as we can. Half those tanks and field pieces down there are made out of poles and straw.’

He did not believe the pilot, that so many of those guns were fake. Breit had reason to suspect differently.

The plane traced the road headed north to Oboyan. Breit floated above three concentric layers of Soviet strongholds, each more formidable than the last. The photographer whirled through endless rolls of film. Across the window, exposed rolls danced around him on the plane’s vibrations. Breit lay on his belly staring in realization and awe at what he had done.

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

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

This was Breit’s handiwork, his painting.

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

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

June 31 1030 hours two kilometers east of Syrtsev along the Oboyan road

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

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

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

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

Syrtsev and Luchanino, and Alekseyevka two miles to the west on the riverbank, served their greatest purpose now, waiting to be destroyed, to maul the Germans when they came to cross the Luchanino River here. To Dimitri’s left was the Oboyan road, the grand prize for the German assault, potholed and shredded but busy anyway with tanks and trucks moving up. Taking the Oboyan road was pivotal for Germany; the poor condition of Russia’s transportation system was one of the country’s greatest defenses. Germany had to control the few paved surfaces to bring up supplies, fuel, and reinforcements. Sending their trucks overland through the endless bogs, overrunning streams, mud, and fields of this immense country was not possible for them. Russians alone knew how to navigate the eternal muck, endless snows, swelling rains, the vast distances, with horses, wagons, hand-pulled carts, blisters, courage, anger. This is Russia, Dimitri thought. It does not want to be conquered.

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

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

Dimitri did not know the numbers, the actual size of what he saw, and he did not care. It was enough that right in front of him – perhaps ten miles across on this clear day, crammed on this flat tableland of central Russia, from the Oboyan road west past the Pena River – was the greatest concentration of rifles, tanks, antitank guns, artillery, mines, barbed wire, blockhouses, and obstacles assembled in the entire war. All the big guns were concentrated and pre-aimed at key points. Over forty thousand antitank and antipersonnel mines had been laid in the ten-mile front of his 6th Guards; that was more than a mine per foot, over a million mines across the whole of the Kursk salient, the explosives laid during the spring in bare fields that were now overgrown with maize, wheat, mustard, sunflowers, and steppe grasses to make the mines almost impossible to detect. The defense works had arisen immense and deep. He’d driven his T-34 past these positions, called pakfronts, during weeks of drills and scrambles. Sixth Guards alone manned two belts in depths up to ten miles and widths to twenty. And there were thirteen more Soviet armies with defenses just as solid throughout the Kursk bulge, with seven extra armies held in reserve. There were eight defensive belts in all, the first three of which were gargantuan, and every one of them was connected by trenches, there must have been a thousand miles of trenches dug on 6th Guards’ front alone. Dimitri shook his head at just what little parcel of it all he could see. When the Germans finally do attack, they’ll have to wade through more than hell. Hell will be just their front door.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yeah!’

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

Dimitri recalled the Cossack fable about the old stallion and the young colt. The young one said to the old, Let’s run down the hill and get us a filly! The old stud shook his great mane and replied, No. Let’s walk down and get them all.

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

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

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

‘Take it away,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

‘You’re not helping.’

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

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘So do you, my dear.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘What’s your name?’

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

‘Sonya.’

‘Just Sonya?’

‘Yes, Private. Just Sonya.’

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

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

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

He narrowed his eyes. She doesn’t know. Ah, she’s too much trouble. One more go-round, then enough. Back to my tank.

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

‘Your sietch.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The same tank.’

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

‘That’s splendid.’

And my daughter.’

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

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

Sonya’s face fell.

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

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

‘How did she…?’

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

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

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

She pulled her spade out of the facing wall. Dimitri followed suit. Sonya seemed to want to let some silence hover, to return to work, as though she dug now with a new purpose, for the dead daughter and the brave Cossack hetman who would fight beside his son here along the dangerous Oboyan road.

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

June 31 2130 hours

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

The air cooled with the lowering sun and the work slacked after the food. The sound of arriving trucks reached them down in the pit, come to take the laborers back to their camp miles to the east away from the front. Andrei got a peck on the cheek from the girl he’d worked beside. Some of the other tankers, unsure bumpkins, backed away, muttering, Nice to meet you, and clambered up the slope. Sonya told Dimitri, Thank you, she hadn’t laughed as much in a day for years. Thank you, Dima. He reached both hands into the water bucket and dipped water to splash his face, then grabbed Sonya in a bear hug. Her breasts against his chest stunned him for a moment, it had been all he thought about the whole day hefting the shovel. He wanted to give her something but had nothing in his pockets, so he gave her a truth. My daughter, he said, is not dead. She’s a pilot. Sonya did not take a swing at him for his gambit; instead she said, So, you are still a hetman, you have a clan. Yes, he said, proud the way she put it. Yes. You’re a good woman, he said. I am, she answered, and lingered in his arms, sea-green eyes flowing over his face. And you need to let me go.

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

‘Let her go, Private.’

‘Your son?’ she asked Dimitri.

‘Yes. The bastard.’

‘Go,’ Sonya said.

‘A kiss first.’

‘No. I don’t know you that well.’

‘I’ve earned a kiss.’

Valentin repeated his command. The sky behind him reddened.

‘Go, Dima. You’ll get in trouble.’

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

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

‘Another time,’ she said.

‘Another time, Just Sonya.’

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

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

June 31 2215 hours

Two boys sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the General Platov. They jumped up when Valentin strode into the glow of their lantern.

‘Sergeant!’ they said together.

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

‘Men, this is your driver. Private…’

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

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

Both were short, the way tankers must be. One was thick, the other lean. Dimitri guessed the chunky one was the loader, he had to be strong to sling the shells around inside the tank, out of the bins and into the breech. The other would be the hull machine-gunner and radioman, if the General had a radio.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Urn… um…’

‘Yes?’

‘Alexander Mikhailovich Frolov.’

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

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

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

Valentin eyed his father.

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

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

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

‘Gather ‘round.’

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

‘Come on, Valya. They’re children.’

‘They’re soldiers.’

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

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

‘Yes! So, you see. We have to do this, every time. Yes? Come on.’ Dimitri steered Valentin by their linked arms back to the lantern, the General, and the two waiting crewmen.

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

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

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

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

‘Excellent, wonderful. You’ll tell us more sometime. Sasha, you. Where is your home?’

The boy licked his lips. ‘Odessa.’

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

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

The boys shook their heads and looked at each other.

‘What do you know about Cossacks? Anything?’

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

‘What would the Cossack do?’

‘I don’t know. Eat us, I guess.’

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

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

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

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

‘General Platov.’

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

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

‘Before the War of 1812, Napoleon knew he would invade Russia. He set out to learn everything he could about the Motherland before attacking. One of the things he found out was that the Cossacks of the Don and Kuban regions were the finest riders and fighters in the world. Better than the Mongols, the British, and better than the French, of course. Napoleon needed good cavalry if he was going to build an empire, and who better than the Cossacks?’

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

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

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

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

‘Napoleon made his offer. “General,” he said, “I would give anything you asked if I could have Cossacks on my side. With twenty thousand of the best cavalrymen in the world fighting with France, no one could stop us.” Platov listened, rubbed his beard, and answered, “I see no problem. This is a very easy thing to do.” Well, Napoleon could hardly believe his ears. “How can we do this, General?” he begged. “Tell me what you require.” The General stood in the grand, golden room of Napoleon and said, “It’s a simple thing. I will bring twenty thousand of my finest young riders to Paris for a few days. You will bring twenty thousand of your prettiest French girls to Paris. We will let Nature take its course, and in twenty years or so you will have your own twenty thousand French Cossacks!”‘

Dimitri spanked his knees with his hands, relishing the old General’s reply every time he told the story. Pasha and Sasha clapped and Valentin rocked back in his seat on the tank. The slanting lantern light made all their faces merry.

‘So, you see,’ Dimitri said. ‘The whole world fears the Cossack. Including Napoleon and Pasha’s mother. And the Germans.’

He leaned into the lantern, to light his face better for this next chapter of the rite. ‘My old father. Your sergeant’s grandfather. He would be here right now if he were alive. Cossack families go to war together. Did you know that?’

The two lads shook their heads.

‘Well, they do. Every Cossack family knows the history of its warriors. The family heroes are remembered with praise, the villains are the cowards or the disloyal ones. When I was your age, I went to war with my father. We wore red-topped caps and black burka cloaks with red hoods. We rode in pigskin boots and kept a tea kettle and sacks of biscuits tied to our belts. I had a curved saber, a carbine with a bayonet, and a goathorn full of powder. We rode first against the Romanovs, those inbred European shits. And when we’d won enough battles against their white cavalry all across western Russia, even on these steppe lands around us right now, the Tsar himself gave in. The Cossacks were rewarded with free land, the right to govern ourselves, and respect! Then, after a few years of royal bribes, when it was clear the Bolsheviks would win, we traded in our white flag for a red one. We turned on the bastard Tsar for the new bastard Lenin. Because the Cossack fights for the Cossack. It doesn’t matter who invades us. Germans or Russians, Tsars or commissars. Napoleon called us the disgrace of the human race. And he was right, if you look at how most humans live!’

The two boys were rapt. Dimitri understood the rotten training these two had been given before they were shipped to the Kursk bulge for their first battle. They’d been bullied and frightened and given no pay and less than a month’s lesson on how to fight in these tanks. Commissars had shouted slogans at them, they’d taken oaths, but no one had talked with them, told them tales of bravery and deeds and mentioned they might have what it takes to do the same, valiant things – podvigs. Valentin and his sour ilk were all they’d seen of the Red Army. These lads were considered nothing more than numbers to be thrown at the Germans.

Dimitri knew he could not make them into more. But if he and Valya were going to fight alongside these boys, they were going to think they were more. Or they would all die, because few die alone in a tank.

‘My father Konstantin was the best swordsman in the Kuban. Did you know a real Cossack sword has no hilt to protect the hand? Do you know why?’

No, they shrugged.

Dimitri cut his eyes to Valentin on the tank. ‘Tell us, Sergeant. About the Cossack sword.’

Valentin ran fingers over his pate. The stubble of his short hair made a fizzing noise. Dimitri held up an open hand, to say please.

Valentin cleared his throat. So needless, Dimitri thought, to be uncomfortable talking to men who may well save your life in the next week. Embrace them, Valya, he urged silently, these are spirits, children like you. Valentin gave the answer, continuing to scratch his head.

‘It… um… it’s not made for dueling. It’s made for striking from horseback.’

‘Exactly. And Pasha, Sasha, I will tell you right now with the pride of a father that your sergeant Berko there was the finest swordsman in all the Kuban when he was your age. Just eighteen, and a champion dzhigitovka! In our village, the streets are wide and there’s a great central square. That is where we hold our war games. On Sundays and holidays, the streets are lined with saplings, set thirty feet apart. On top of the trees are clay pots. The test, you see, is to gallop full bore between the trees and cut the pots with your sword. And Valentin there… well, your sergeant there, he was the best. Slashing back and forth, boys, he was a sight! A champion!’

Pasha looked up at Valentin. ‘Did you cut them off, like cutting off heads?’

Valentin appeared impatient, not with the query so much as his own past, before he became a sergeant for the Soviets. Watching his son fidget, Dimitri recalled the day when young Valya came to him and said he was going to join the army. ‘Wonderful,’ he had said, ‘we’ll go together. Yes! We’ll be in the cavalry’ And Valentin answered him, ‘No, I want to join the tanks.’ The tanks! The metal horses, slow and stupid beasts, with a cannon and armor and dials where there ought to be a pounding heart and lungs and a life under your rear, not a hard seat and a stubborn clutch. A tank instead of a horse. A Soviet instead of a champion son. Dimitri listened to Valentin’s response to the boy Pasha, and thought, He sounds like a stinking Romanov up there high on his tank.

‘No, Private… no. A Cossack does not cut off heads.’

‘But…’ Pasha seemed to want to be scared, to hear of heads rolling by the dozens on the Cossack battlefield.

‘Only poor Cossacks cut off heads, Pashinka,’ Dimitri said. ‘Not your sergeant. He practiced hard and became a master of the many different saber cuts from horseback.’

‘You mean there’s more than…?’ Pasha drew a finger under his neck.

‘Yes, yes.’ Dimitri got to his knees and made a blade of his open hand. ‘There’s the one straight down on the shoulder to take off an arm.’ He hacked at Pasha, who laughed. Sasha beside him giggled. ‘There’s this one, to cut open his guts. One across the hip…’ With each description Dimitri sliced at the two boys to make them laugh and understand they were more than numbers now, they were clan with him and, yes, the sergeant.

Dimitri sat back and glanced again up to Valentin. His son smiled thinly at his father’s antics. Alright, the smile said, enough. We are who we are, Father. So, enough. Dimitri sighed, and held up a hand for more of their attention.

‘The life of every Cossack relies on two things. First, his fellow Cossacks. He must be willing to die and kill for them, to never betray their trust. The second is his horse. The bond between rider and horse goes deeper than words. It is instinct and devotion. And do you know who was the best rider in my village?’

It was Valentin who gave the answer. ‘Katerina.’

Dimitri turned to beam at Valentin.

‘My daughter Katya. She was a champion, too. There was nothing she couldn’t do on the back of a horse. She could leap across a stream and lean down from the saddle to take a drink.’

‘No,’ whispered red Sasha.

‘Yes,’ Dimitri breathed back.

‘Where is Katya now?’ Sasha asked.

‘She’s a Night Witch. You’ve heard of the Night Witches?’

‘Yes!’ Pasha blurted. ‘My mother used to tell us the Night Witches would come if we…’

‘Pasha.’

‘Yes?’

‘Your mother used to frighten you a lot, didn’t she?’

‘Yes. Well… urn…’

‘Were you as bad a child as all that?’

Sasha laughed first, then Valentin and Dimitri. Pasha took a jabbing elbow from the quiet hull gunner and chuckled, too.

‘Katya’s a pilot,’ Valentin explained, ‘my sister is a night bomber.’

‘Oh.’ Pasha blushed enough to be orange in the lantern shine.

Dimitri asked, ‘Now, do you boys want to become Cossacks?’

Sasha’s eyes went wide. ‘Is that something you can do? Can you do that?’ He turned to his mate Pasha, but the thick boy shook his head, skeptical. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Dima’s playing with us again. We won’t be real Cossacks. It’s a game.’

Dimitri kept still, embedding his gaze into Pasha’s eyes.

‘It’s no game.’

Skinny Sasha jutted his nose at Dimitri. ‘Yes. Make me a Cossack.’

Dimitri waited for Pasha’s face to change. The loader looked up at his sergeant. Valentin nodded to him.

Pasha said, ‘Me, too.’

‘Listen,’ Dimitri said. ‘You’ve got to know the history first. This is the story of the Cossacks. Centuries ago, Russia was different than it is today. Before the Soviets. In the long time of the Tsars. Russia was a collection of little kingdoms, ruled by boyars and landlords. The people were either rich aristocrats or poor peasants and serfs. But there was one place where the gentry didn’t run things. My homeland, Ukraine. Even its name tells you how free it was: ‘Borderland.’ During this time, Ukraine was a giant and unsettled country, a wild land. There was room to roam, there were fish and grainlands, grasses for cattle and sheep and horses. The first Cossacks were criminals. These were men who wanted their freedom enough to risk their lives to get it. They were running from the law. Or they were sentries from some landlord’s army, who got tired of manning a post and fighting someone else’s battles and ran away. The first Cossack was an escaped serf. Or he might have been some highborn who screwed the wrong peasant girl or stole another lord’s land and came to avoid scandal or being hung. He might have been a Greek or a Turk looking for adventure. Whoever he was, boys, whatever he was running from, his trouble was not going to follow him into Ukraine. He got a clean slate. And while the Russian state to the north and east was getting more and more civilized and tamed, Ukraine stayed without masters. It was a place for the common man, for bandits and fugitives, vagabonds and slaves to remake their lives. These men who skulked into Ukraine became farmers and trappers. They settled the land and raised their families. Everyone was equal.’

Pasha and Sasha watched him, spellbound; with his hands, Dimitri carved for them Ukraine out of the air, made pistols out of his fingers for the bandits, whips across the backs of the serfs, and open, clear fields with sweeps of his palm.

Sasha raised a hand like a schoolboy to ask a question.

‘How did the Cossacks learn to fight?’

‘A good question, Pashinka. The plains of Ukraine were not empty when the first Cossacks came. Hordes of Mohammedan tribesman roamed there. So the Cossacks were forced to band together. They learned from their battles with the Mohammedans, who were wonderful horsemen. The Cossacks borrowed the best of what they saw and soon became even better riders and warriors. But even when the Cossacks found themselves coming together for survival, they maintained their love for kazak, their freedom. They asked little from those who wished to join them. Only three things does a Cossack have in common with all other Cossacks. Three questions, and you have to answer yes to each. Are you ready?’

The two boys hesitated. Dimitri was tickled at the gravity he’d created in them.

‘Yes,’ both uttered.

Dimitri’s legs were tired, his knees griped. But this part of the rite had to be done standing.

‘Alright, get up.’

Valentin stayed in his place on the tank.

When Pasha and Sasha were on their feet, Dimitri asked, ‘Do you want to become Cossacks?’

Both nodded.

‘Say so,’ Dimitri prodded.

‘Yes!’ they said, a bit too loud. Dimitri kept a serious demeanor though he wanted to grin.

‘Good, good. Hold it down, lads. Next question. Will you die if you must for another member of your clan, and for your freedom?’

‘Yes.’ The two boys stood shoulder to shoulder. Dimitri watched them press closer to each other.

And last. Do you believe in God?’

The two boys Pasha and Sasha answered well. ‘Yes. I do. Yes.’

‘Good. Bend your knees. Let’s pray’

Dimitri dropped to his knees on the tank-crushed grass. Pasha and Sasha knelt with him. Dimitri did not glance up at his son. He didn’t want to know if Valentin was praying or simply watching with his Soviet disdain. Dimitri said a silent prayer for the lives of these two youths he’d been given. He asked God to only take them if they were greatly needed to win the battle. Let them stay Cossacks as long as they can, God, let them be free on the earth. But if You cannot, let them be free in heaven. He asked also for God to protect Valya and Katya. He did not ask for himself.

One of the boys said Amen,’ finished with his prayer. Dimitri ended his and lifted his head before he realized the Amen’ was Valentin’s. He stood, Pasha and Sasha scrambled to their feet. Dimitri stepped to his son’s perch on the General and patted Valya’s knee. Valya was maddening this way. Dimitri could never be comfortable with his frustration or his pride in the boy. He did not know Valya at all.

‘This,’ he said to the loader and the hull gunner, newly minted Cossacks, ‘is your hetman. He is your sergeant and your tank commander, but he is your Cossack leader, too. You’ll do everything he orders. Is this understood?’

Valentin slid down from the tank.

‘Are we done?’

Dimitri itched to backhand the boy for the sudden swings he caused in Dimitri’s chest.

At that moment – because, thought Dimitri, there is a God and He listens and once in a while even if you don’t ask He answers – a convoy of panel trucks rumbled up through the dark, headlamps jouncing over the ruts in the field cut by the company of heavy tanks. In the beds of the trucks, lit by the lights of the vehicles in line behind, jostled crowds of old men holding up bottles, and women. Dimitri saw fiddles, an accordion, and even a clarinet.

He recognized her voice. Just Sonya called out for him.

He moved to his son and lapped his arm across the boy’s shoulder.

‘Yes, Sergeant. We’re done. Excuse me.’

Dimitri grabbed his two new charges by their lapels and tugged them away from the lantern, telling them they had an additional duty as Cossacks to perform. They must each take a girl.

‘Dima, is this another game?’ Pasha asked, lagging at the end of Dimitri’s arm.

‘Yes,’ Dimitri told him, ‘and Cossacks play it well. Come.’

July 1 1430 hours Kalinovka aerodrome

Katya stood beside a dozen other girls from her regiment watching the truck roll closer to the aerodrome. The others hoped longer than she did, asking, ‘Is it them? Can you see?’ But Katya noted from far away how the four women in the back of the approaching truck held on with both hands to the side rails, how they did not wave their white silk underhelmets in the afternoon. They were not the four Night Witches come back from the dead, but replacements. Zoya and Galina, Marina and Lily were gone. They were not in this afternoon’s truck the way they were not in the truck yesterday or the day before. The four dead friends would stay Night Witches forever now, they would never be. anything else. That is not such a bad way to die, Katya thought, to remain for all time someone brave. She was the first to turn from the road.

Leonid said nothing. He put his arm around her shoulders and walked with Katya to the big tent her squadron shared. Minutes behind her the other girls did come in from the road, some even saying, Tomorrow, maybe tomorrow. Katya and Leonid opened the four girls’ steamer trunks. Diaries and personal items would be sent home to their parents. Unmailed letters would be posted. The four beds would be remade for the replacement pilots and navigators. Katya was moved by the disparity of things she and Leonid pulled from the trunks: stuffed animals and extra signal flares, dried flowers and flight logs.

The other girls milled around the four beds, littered now with items from the trunks. They joined Katya in sifting through the objects, arranging piles, recognizing and weeping over mementos, sitting on the beds remembering many talks. This was not the first time there had been deaths in their squadron, but it was the only instance when two crews had been lost on a single mission. The doubled blow seemed almost too great.

Katya watched Leonid withdraw from the tent; Katya had the others around her now. She rose from Lily’s cot. The springs squeaked, a sign of life but not of Lily’s, and Katya had to hold back tears over such a small thing.

She went outside. Leonid stood staring into the midday sky.

‘Today’s the first day of July,’ he said.

Katya nodded.

‘How much longer can they wait?’ she asked, gazing up with him. The battle would take place underneath and in this sky; the blue that fell all the way to the horizon gave Katya the sense the battle would be fought in tight quarters, two titanic fighters in a bout, under this ringing blue sky.

‘I don’t know. It should have started by now’

Katya was jarred, this seemed insensitive. She wanted to point back into the tent, to the sobbing girls, and tell Leonid it has started. But she knew what he meant. It’s going to be worse, far worse, than anything before. So she let the comment alone.

‘Walk with me, Leonya, will you?’

She turned and headed for the hardstands where the eighteen U-2S of her squadron sat chocked and waiting. She did not speak along the way.

When they reached her plane, Leonid ran his hands over the patched wings. He patted the engine housing and plucked the wire struts. He chewed his lips in thought. Katya watched him and again felt the sting of resentment. Was Leonid being condescending, the way he looked over her intrepid little plane? He tapped on the U-2 as though he’d never seen one. Then he squatted on his heels. With a finger he drew a circle in the dust.

‘This is your target tonight. Show me how you’ll attack.’

Katya walked over to sit cross-legged beside the little circle. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Show me your flight and attack plan.’

She was in no mood to have her squadron criticized, especially not by a free-ranging, fast-flying fighter pilot. Four dead comrades bought her this day free from tongue clucking.

‘I want to go back to the tent.’

‘And do what? Mourn some more?’

Katya gripped a fist of dirt and flung it at Leonid.

‘Yes. Mourn some more. Maybe there can’t be enough mourning.’

‘That’s selfish.’

Katya cocked her head and repeated the word with shocked silence. Selfish?

‘Yes. And what do you think I’ll do when it’s you dead on the ground because you’d rather cry than adapt? Do you think I’ll sit on your bed and go through your trunk? Or do you think I’ll get back into my Yak and shoot down some more Germans? What do you think, Katya? Which is it for you? Do you want to fight or do you need a fresh handkerchief? Do you want to learn something? Because if you do, you need to do it right now. You have another mission tonight, and there’s going to be another night fighter waiting for you.’

Katya clamped her teeth. Leonid had not even wiped off the dirt she’d heaved on him, the dark bits salted his folded lap.

‘Show me,’ Leonid said.

Katya made her hand into a plane, spreading thumb and pinky for wings. It was simple. She approached the target at three thousand feet. One mile out, she cut her engine and glided in, bleeding off altitude to twelve hundred feet. Here she lowered her hand over the dirt circle. She dropped her bombs, hit the magnetos and throttle, and got away as fast as she could from the lights and guns. She banked her hand away from the circle and raised it, heading for home. Three minutes behind, approaching the target right about now, was the next bomber, coming from the same direction at the same altitude. Simple, she thought, again watching her hand sail safely away, not a scratch on it. Then she asked herself the question before Leonid could: What if there is another night fighter waiting for us tonight? Will we fly right into his sights again?

Katya made another plane out of her free hand. This was the German Me-109, stalking high above the target for the Night Witches who floated in straight and on time.

Will we do anything different tonight? No. Leonid is right. Who will it be, then, in flames next?

‘Do you have an idea?’ she asked.

Leonid sat cross-legged with her. ‘Do you?’

Katya looked at the two hands she hovered above the circle in the dirt. One was a defenseless bomber, the other was the black German fighter. The German hand licked its chops. He had the speed and gunnery to make a joke of her regiment’s standard attack plan. He already had. Then it struck her.

What if both hands were Night Witches?

‘Leonya. What if we take in two planes instead of one?’

Leonid nodded. He looked down at the dirt circle with her, picturing the altitude, the light beams searching, flak exploding. She could see the plan hatching in his head even as it took shape in her own. The scheme was just as simple as what their squadron had been doing for the past year. Perhaps that’s why it had been overlooked. This new adversary, the night fighter, called for a new tactic. Katya allowed herself an inward smile, even on this sad day.

Two planes will fly in together. The first ignores the target, but instead draws the attention of the searchlights and the artillery batteries. Meanwhile, the other Night Witch glides straight for the target. Once she drops her load, both planes hit the gas, climb, and circle back. But next time they switch roles. If all the dodging plane has to worry about is staying away from the lights, the guns and night fighters, she can do a better job of staying alive. And if all the bomber has to do is bear down on the target without avoiding the lights, she can be more accurate. When the first pair’s sortie is over, the next two in line do the same. Yes?

‘Yes,’ said Leonid, snapping his fingers. ‘And make sure you stagger the times between pairs, and vary the direction you fly in from. No night fighter can hit what he can’t find.’

Katya worked her two hands over the target, practicing the maneuver over the dirt circle, determining altitudes and patterns so the two U-2s wouldn’t collide in the dark and confusion. The strategy made sense. It could work.

Leonid said nothing while Katya worked out the plan. Then he reached above the dirt circle and took one of her hands in his own, as though his hand was flying beside hers over the make-believe target.

‘Hey.’

Katya’s hand hovered in his. Their eyes locked high above, among the pretend stars.

Leonid said, ‘I know you lost four friends. I am trying to help. It’s just my clumsy way of doing it.’

Katya gazed at their elevated and linked arms. We’re both better up here, she thought, more graceful in the air than we are on the ground. She set Leonid’s hand loose.

‘It’s alright,’ she said. She wanted to say more but could not figure what it would be. The firmness of his hand in hers and the concern in his warning, the gentleness of his apology, these were all opposites of the grief and fear rummaging in her heart. Katya felt guilty and tugged at. She sensed risk and vulnerability and so banked hard away from it.

‘I’ll go and tell the others. See what they think.’

Leonid rose first, taking the cue from her voice. He looked down at her from his height. He said, ‘Good luck tonight,’ and walked off to his own hangar.

She watched him stride away, his name on her lips. ‘Good luck to you,’ she mumbled instead to his back.

Katya rose, glum over how she’d left things with Leonid. He’d spoken sharply to her and she’d returned fire, then they’d both retreated before anything could be damaged badly. She shook her head. No, their friendship was too strong, nothing would have been damaged. Gazing into the immense blue sky, where God lived and she herself galloped, Katya wondered, Was it harm Leonid and I averted just now, or was it something else, something secret revealing itself on this mournful day? What would I have said to Leonid if I’d let myself speak? Would it have been…? The sky had no answers for her, only endless room for asking. No, she thought. Comrades have died, and comrades can be saved with this new tactic. There’s a mission to be flown, and a major battle looming. I have my answer.

She entered the command tent and found the captain of her squadron, Nina Vasi Pyevna Smirnova. She told the captain the new strategy. Smirnova was impressed and asked Katya to write it up. Katya would address the pilots and navigators at their briefing in a few hours.

Tonight’s mission would be above a rail station deep inside enemy lines. The partisan network had identified a trainload of German heavy tanks being transported to Belgorod. Efforts were being made to stop this train. One partisan cell was planning to attack the train itself. The partisans needed the Night Witches to take out the station, its water tower, maintenance shed, and tracks to slow the train’s progress.

Tonight, she and Vera were assigned to fly one of the two lead planes.

July 1 2130 hours

Katya lay inside the tent and did not see dusk settle over the steppe, but she knew it had come when she heard the first Yak-9 fighters tear away from the field. The pages of her report jostled and mingled on her cot when she jumped off it to run outside.

She was too late. Leonid’s plane was the third to take off. His climb was beautiful to watch, his sleek fighter rose and Katya thrilled to the engine’s power. She saw the top of Leonid’s helmet through the clear bell of his cockpit and felt a palpable rising in her chest, as though part of her heart were flying off with him, banking hard in line with the others on night patrol. The rising went into her hand and she hoisted it in a wave he would not see. The last of the Yaks bounded off the grass field. The pilots closed ranks over the airstrip, then flew beyond sight and sound. Once they were gone, Katya listened to the wide silence return under the vast and bruising steppe sky, serrated only by crickets and some mechanic hammering at something stubborn.

Katya trod back to the tent. She completed the report and closed her eyes. Other girls filtered in, squeaking their cots for some rest before the night’s mission. No one spoke, a few snored, and Katya drifted away. She awoke a little while later when the other girls stirred. There was a change in her when she sat up. She recollected a vague sense from a dream she must have had while napping. The dream was of her and Leonid. She remembered a closed door between them. She did not recall if the door ever opened in the dream. She felt bereft of him; he’d taken off before she could see him and explore again what she’d wanted to say, perhaps even what she wanted to hear. The door in the dream was closed, she knew that now. Sitting upright on the cot, she rubbed her eyes awake and made a decision, to leave the door open. Vera walked past on her way to the briefing. She stopped in front of Katya’s cot.

‘What?’ Vera asked.

Katya looked up at her navigator. The girl wore a kind and silly grin. She leaned down to Katya, to read something in her eyes as though on one of her maps.

‘Hmm?’

Vera leaned down farther. ‘What’s with you? You’ve got a look on your face.’

Katya made no response. She stood from the cot and grabbed her report. Vera blocked her way. She called to the other girls, ‘Did you see the look?’

‘Yes,’ a few answered. ‘A definite look.’

Katya snorted and spun away from Vera. Laughing Night Witches hooted behind her, ‘A look, yes, yes. I saw it.’

Vera caught up with her outside the tent.

‘So, Katyusha. Did you and Leonid…’

‘No!’ Katya held up the pages she’d prepared. ‘We’ve got a mission tonight. Do you think you could get your crazy brain to focus on that right now?’

‘Yes, Katyusha.’ Vera feigned shame. ‘Of course, my pilot.’ She stabbed a finger into Katya’s face. ‘But you’ll tell me everything when we get back, or I’ll ask Leonid. We’ll see what he says.’

The briefing took an hour. The pilots and navigators discussed Katya’s proposal, refined it, then accepted it. Katya received a round of applause. Captain Smirnova sent them out to get ready. Take-off would be in fifteen minutes, at 2200 hours. The sun’s long goodbye over the steppe was still in progress when Katya strode outside the command tent. In the remaining glimmer, she spotted the fuselage lights of the first Yak-9 returning to the field. In moments the sound of the plane came within range. The engine sputtered. Something was wrong.

Men ran past Katya to the edge of the grass landing strip. Many carried fire extinguishers, a few hauled medic boxes. Katya kept her eyes in the dimming sky, on the flashes from the oncoming plane. Then the Yak came into view. Smoke trailed behind it, blacker than the congealing night. The engine coughed and the plane pitched, dipping and unsure. Katya crept closer to the field, some of the other girls in her squadron came with her. The fighter came in too steep. Katya’s lips formed the words Pull up, pull up, and at the last moment the nose of the Yak-9 lifted, the wheels hit the ground but bounced the fighter back into the air. Then the engine cut. The Yak touched down and stayed, running fast over the grass, but the dulled propeller slowed and the fighter turned off the runway in a sharp pivot. The engine was throttled back. The Yak did not taxi to its assigned station but halted where it was off the runway and quit. An acrid haze billowed from the engine until runners doused it with white chemicals. Others climbed the wing, shoved back the cockpit bell, and clotted around the pilot. Fingers touched the back of Katya’s fist. Vera stood beside her. Katya opened her balled hand and took Vera’s in hers.

More planes landed, none as badly as the first wounded plane; that pilot was hauled away on a stretcher and his plane was pushed by a ground crew to its hardstand. Three more in Leonid’s squadron of a dozen trailed smoke when they touched down. The eleventh plane landed and Katya scanned the maroon sky for his green and red running lights. Vera’s hand tightened around hers.

‘He’s coming,’ Katya said.

The eleventh and last plane was the squadron commander. Katya watched this pilot park his fighter, climb off, and speak to his mechanic. The sky did not issue another plane for Katya, the only lights were the first winking stars. The commander headed away to make his report. Katya felt her dread swell with every passing second, each step the squadron leader took was another thing that would make Leonid’s failure to appear final. Without thinking, she released Vera’s hand and ran across the field through the warm smells of exhaust and burned oil. Weaving through the wings she saw the bullet holes ripped into the planes.

‘Captain,’ she called, ‘Captain, please. A moment, sir.’

The grimness of the officer’s face was plain when he turned to her. Katya ran up beside him but he did not stop. She stepped into his path.

‘Captain, please. Lieutenant Lumanov. I didn’t see him land.’

‘No.’

This single word tore through Katya like one of the bullets through the Yaks.

She fought for her composure. ‘Can you tell me, sir, what happened? Where is he?’

‘Who are you, Lieutenant?’

‘Katerina Berkovna, sir. I’m with…’

‘Yes, you’re one of the Night Witches. I know. Leonid tells me about you.’

‘Captain, please.’

‘There was a dogfight over Tomarovka. He was shot down, Lieutenant.’

Katya seized up, her lungs seemed to bite at her from inside her ribs.

Before she could speak, the Captain laid a hand on her shoulder.

‘I flew over his crash site. He sent up a white flare. He’s alive. But he’s pretty deep inside German territory. I don’t have any way to know if he’s injured or how badly. He’s a clever lad, Lieutenant. I suppose you know that.’

Katya muttered, ‘Yes.’ The word was a relief, better than another wounding No, but the comfort was cold. Tomarovka was six miles south of the front line. Leonid might have been badly hurt in the crash. Yes, he survived, but for how long? Until he bleeds to death, or a German patrol captures him? The Captain studied her face. She did not know or care how much she showed him.

‘We’ll alert the partisans in the area. They’ll try to get to him first. That’s all we can do, Lieutenant. You understand?’

Katya nodded. Leonid had been shot down. She’d imagined this fate for herself with every mission over the past year, she’d suffered with her mates when this fate fell on others in her regiment, she’d seen it happen in the sky more than she cared to remember. But never once had she prepared herself for this to happen to Leonid.

But the worst had not happened. He was still alive.

The Captain cleared his throat. ‘I’ve got to make my report. Good luck. Lieutenant?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’d like to tell you something. Leonid has made me appreciate you Night Witches. I… wanted to be sure you knew that.’

The praise was spoiled. Katya wanted to beat the man’s chest: Why didn’t you bring him back?

‘Thank you, sir.’

The Captain sidestepped her. Impulsively, Katya reached for his arm.

‘Captain? West of Tomarovka? East?’

‘East, Lieutenant. Two miles due east. In a small field beside a dry creek.’

‘Thank you, Captain. Thank you.’

Katya turned to hurry away, but this time the Captain stopped her.

‘I hear those broomsticks of yours can set down almost anywhere. Is that true?’

‘Yes, Captain. Anywhere.’

July 1 2340 hours over no-man’s-land Voronezh Front

Leonid was on the ground. This notion wrapped Katya as tightly as did the flying night. She tried to keep her mind on the mission, on the train station far inside enemy lines, but like a disobedient horse her thoughts shied from her instruments, away from the wind in her wings. She tightened her mental reins and brought her own head around to attention on the raid.

Only a wedge of moon glowed behind soupy clouds. She and Vera cruised southward at four thousand feet. Far to port, the other U-2 belched little exhaust fires from its engine. The plan was for that crew, Olga Sanfirova and navigator Olga Kluyeva, to attack the station first while Katya and Vera diverted the defenses, then they would switch roles. The darkness tonight was dense enough for them to hide in its folds. Katya kept one eye on the popping blue fires from the Olgas to avoid drifting too close to them. Vera remained quieter than usual in Katya’s earphones. Something was unsaid between the two of them. This added to Katya’s sense of burden in the cockpit. Leonid was on the ground. Katya chugged through the air, distracted and scared, and Vera, never a mystery, was silent.

The air currents were smooth and the flight was even. Vera’s direction brought them in range of the target only forty minutes after take-off. The rail station lay fifteen miles south of Belgorod in the village of Oktabrskaya. The tracks ran alongside the Lopan River, and Vera brought Katya and their bombs down the slim waterway to the lights of the village. They were deeper tonight behind German lines than they had yet flown. Katya checked the two Olgas. They were dead even to port.

‘Cut engine,’ Vera said.

Katya pushed in the throttle and switched off the magnetos. The plane began to sail, and under her gaze the two Olgas disappeared, their motor shut down, too. Katya began to drop altitude, gliding and accelerating to the target. The Olgas would hold up here at four thousand for a count of ten, then begin their muffled dive. Katya looked out through the flipping propeller, the whoosh of wind mounted, and she thought, Leonid, I must leave you for a few moments, please hang on.

‘Steady,’ Vera intoned. Katya grabbed a flare and readied it. No searchlights lashed out yet, their approach was fast and unspoiled. The air she slid down was silken and beneath the rushing wind everything was hushed. The ground below slipped by, wary and dangerous.

Then, high over her head, she heard a snarling deep and unseen in the dark.

The night fighter circled. The Germans had success with this countermove once, so they tried it again. There would be no artillery tonight, just lights and the game of hunter and quarry.

Katya licked dry lips. It was time to find out if the quarry’s new tactic would work.

Her altimeter read twenty-five hundred feet. Vera whispered -she’d heard the howl of the night fighter, too – ‘Drop it.’

Katya struck the flare and tossed it out of the cockpit. For a second, the bottom of her upper wing jittered white from the bursting flare, then she banked away. The train station of Oktabrskaya was made garish by the sparks floating down under the tiny parachute. The flare glittered against the roof tiles and the vacant steel rails. In the next instant, everything was punched out of Katya’s sight by a hard white fist of light.

A searchlight beam drove straight into her face. Katya slammed her eyes shut and whipped the stick to the left, ramming hard on the left rudder to swing the U-2’s nose around in a snap turn. Behind her eyelids the blackness was alive with a starburst of electric swirls and hues.

‘Level out, level out!’ Vera shouted in the intercom.

‘I can’t see!’

Katya felt Vera’s hands on the stick, but the girl was not a pilot, the stick waggled directionless and panicky.

‘We’re in the lights! Katya, come on!’

Katya tried to open her eyes but the world was a morass. She shut them again.

‘Vera, let go!’

‘What! We have to…’

‘Let go!’

Katya felt Vera release the U-2. She laid her own hand on the stick and sensed her plane, the speed and gravity of her flight. A thousand times she’d ridden in the saddle with eyes closed, wearing blindfolds to do tricks, as a child she could do a handstand and canter in the ring with Papa at the center, her horse on his long lead. She lifted her chin, tilted her head, and knew she was rolling left. She twitched the stick back and to the right and the nose came up, the starboard wings dropped and trimmed out. She ducked her head into the well of the open cockpit, out of the searchlights, and opened her eyes. Her vision was stained but the gauges reappeared. She was flying level, at nineteen hundred feet.

Without hesitating, Katya whipped the plane into a steep corkscrew left, diving and twisting away from the powerful beams. In that instant, scorching red tracers flashed in her wake. The roar of the black Me-109 blasted behind her tail, the German’s engine screaming to pull the fighter out of its dive. Katya followed the sound in a swooping power arch behind, then beneath, then in front and above her, cleaving through the air like a scythe. The noise was wicked and mesmerizing, fusing every bit of Katya to it so that she didn’t notice she’d slipped out of the searchlights. She turned to look back at the station and every search beam was trained in her direction, away from the two Olgas. Katya blew out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Her strategy was working, even though the night fighter had missed her and Vera by inches!

Katya’s altitude was down to twelve hundred feet. Her vision cleared. She glided into a slow wide turn in time to see the bombs hit the station. The little building erupted and even sailing a half mile past the target Katya saw brick and tile shards and burning timbers flung in the air, lit by the explosions. She flicked the magnetos and the propeller caught. She throttled power to gain more height for her bombing run. High above, the deadly night fighter skulked in circles. Behind her, the Olgas switched on their motor and together the planes gained altitude in a tight spiral. At three thousand feet the two Olgas cut power and glided away. Katya held back until she saw the searchlights sweep the night, watched them miss the dancing Night Witch, glance her, then lose their dazzling grip. The night fighter was too fast for its own good; it couldn’t spot the slow and mobile U-2s as long as they stayed out of the light. The German would have no prey. The two Olgas swung left and right, riding the creases of darkness between the swaying beams. Katya followed them in. She put her nose dead on the burning train station, cut power, and one minute later blew the Oktabrskaya tracks into scrap.

July 2 0055 hours

‘Vera.’

The navigator did not answer right away. Moments later, Katya said again, ‘Vera.’

‘Just a second.’

Katya turned to look in the cockpit behind her. Vera’s flashlight swept over her lap, across a flapping topographical map. Vera made notes on a pad strapped to her leg. She leaned her head out over the fuselage and took some mental snapshot of a landmark below, then entered it on her notepad. She trained the flashlight on her stopwatch.

Off the tail, three miles behind Vera’s bent head, the second flight of night bombers was over the target. The searchlights sliced back and forth, a good sign, they could not find the Witches working in tandem. The burning station made an easy bull’s-eye.

Katya pivoted to face forward. Off the port wing flew the Olgas, their U-2’s signature blue flames a halo around their engine.

‘Any time, Vera.’ Katya noticed her own tone was impatient.

‘Now’

Katya drew out the fuel mixture knob slowly to lean out the gasoline and increase the air flowing to the engine. She teased the motor just to the point of choking, then goosed the mixture. The plane coughed and sputtered, dipping in altitude. Katya rode the control to make the plane spit as loudly as it could.

The two Olgas swung alongside. Vera waved her flashlight at them to signal distress. When the other plane was close enough, Katya pushed in the control to smooth the engine. Her little U-2 caught and rose. Vera lowered the flashlight, and Katya slid out the knob once more. The engine hacked. Katya let the plane stumble in the air. The Olgas stayed by her side, matching her rise and fall. She reached for the flashlight. She shined it on herself, to make a signal to the Olgas that she was having engine trouble but she would be okay. At that moment, she pulled out the throttle all the way to shut off the fuel, flicked off the magnetos, and let the engine quit. She cut off the flashlight, banked hard beneath the two Olgas, and vanished from their sight.

Vera guided her. ‘Come to port a little more.’ Katya tweaked the gliding plane to the northwest. She felt a twinge that her fellow Night Witches were surely flying mad circles behind them, looking for a struggling plane or a crash landing. After a minute of silent running, having spent only a thousand feet of altitude, she struck up the propeller and powered the U-2 back to four thousand feet.

‘We should cross the Udy River in about eight minutes,’ Vera said. At this speed, we’ll be over Tomarovka twelve minutes after that. Two miles east, right?’

‘Yes.’ Katya put fingertips on the stick. The U-2 was marvelously stable.

‘Verushka?’

‘What.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me.’

‘Yes, thank you. Leonid will thank you.’

Vera did not reply. Katya kept the plane on a straight heading. Leonid had been on the ground now for just under two hours. Enough time for German patrols or the partisans to get to him, enough time to bleed to death. Katya’s plan was simple, because it was the only move she could make. She hoped to fly close enough to Leonid in the dark for him to recognize the popping Russian engine. If he was still alive, he would send up another flare to tell her so. She and Vera would set down in the nearest clearing, scoop him up, and lift him to safety. She’d brought along an emergency medical kit in case Leonid had wounds. She carried a pistol strapped to her belt; Vera did not, the girl knew nothing about firearms. They would have to locate him somewhere east of Tomarovka, set down in an unknown pasture in the dark, then gather him up and take off across this same field, missing ruts and irrigation ditches, creeks and stumps. If he could not walk they must carry him somehow to the plane. They had to reach him before the Germans, who may have seen the white flare Leonid fired for his squadron commander, and they must get out ahead of their guns. They had to fly low and very slow to find him, above an untold number of enemies. There was not a single step of the plan that was not dangerous. Katya wanted to talk some more about what they were facing but Vera stayed stony. This was a reversal of their natures.

It occurred to Katya that Vera was scared.

‘Vera, we have to do this.’

The navigator did not reply.

Katya kept talking. ‘We’ll be alright. He’s alive. I know he is.’

‘So are we.’ She noted Vera’s heavy sigh in her earphones.

‘There’s no one else who can do this! It’s up to us.’

‘The partisans. You said the partisans were in the area.’ Vera took the same harsh tone, the intercom made both their voices thorny.

‘Yes, they are. But they’re going after the train tonight, who knows if they’ll send help after a downed pilot? The Germans will definitely go after him.’

More silence. Katya tried to fix her mind on the black flying and the rescue ahead but she required more, she needed forgiveness for bringing Vera into this extra peril.

‘You’re being very brave.’

In response, Vera almost barked. ‘Don’t we do enough? We risk our lives in these shitty little airplanes they give us. Leonid risked his, too. He knew this could happen. We do enough, Katya.’

Katya wondered, How can I answer her? How can I say, No, we don’t, we never do enough so long as a friend is in trouble. How do I tell this girl, my good friend, that I would die to find him? I can’t do otherwise. She knows this. She agreed to come. She’s just frightened.

‘If he’s not there, we’ll go on. I promise, we’ll only look for a few minutes.’

‘And if we find him?’

‘Then, Verushka, you have to trust that I’m the best pilot you know and I can land this plane on a ruble.’

Vera made no response. Behind Katya the flashlight came on. Vera was checking her maps.

‘There’s the Udy River. Straight now, twelve miles. Damn it. Let’s get him and go home, wing-walker.’

Katya chuckled. This was her absolution from Vera, the bond and honor between them was stronger than the danger. The U-2 bumped over an air current, and this was a signal to focus on their task. Leonid was on the ground, and the Night Witches were coming for him.

They flew over the heads of a hundred thousand enemy soldiers. The Germans drew back a hundred thousand bolts, stuffed themselves deeper into their helmets or holes, winced, and eyed the night sky for a glimpse of the Russian plane droning past in the dark. They knew the sound of the U-2’s puttering engine. But none would know it better than Leonid, and none would be happy to hear it but him.

The village of Tomarovka lay where the Vorskla River crossed an east-west rail line running to Belgorod. Vera located the tracks and kept Katya over them, headed west. The area where the fighter captain had said Leonid was down should be within two or three miles of these tracks. When Vera whispered they were five miles east of the village, Katya began her descent. She had to fly in low enough to be certain Leonid would hear her. And if he did send up a flare, Katya and Vera would need to get on and off the ground fast.

At two thousand feet, the potshots began. Katya did not hear the reports from the rifles and machine pistols, but muzzle flashes like a carpet of orange sparks blinked in her path. She could not glide over these men and guns, the motor had to keep running, that was her signal to Leonid. One ragged hole appeared in the port wing. She kept the U-2 flying straight; it made no sense to dodge, these were blind shots. She settled lower, to fifteen hundred feet, and leveled.

Tomarovka sat three miles to the west, dead and invisible. So close to the front lines, the occupying Germans hunkered without lights. Vera found a bend in the rail tracks that matched her map. ‘Start circling,’ she said. Her voice was firm and this gladdened Katya. She took the plane into a soft bank, dipping the port wings to look down at a velvet black earth. She prayed for Leonid to hear her. She asked that he be in a smooth field, that he not be hurt, that the Germans not know he was there until she had taken him away. She felt that God heard her better when she was in the air. She was closer to Him, to His domain, mimicking His angels. Katya muttered, ‘Amen.’ Vera said, ‘I don’t know what you were asking for, but Amen, too.’

Katya swept in a wide arc, staring at miles of nothing, as though down an eternal well, the earth was so featureless. Her engine pop-pop-ed. She flicked her eyes once at the gauges to make certain of her attitude and height, then did not pull her gaze from the deep, horizonless ground. She drifted lower, to make her engine louder. The propeller and pistons shouted: Leonid, Leonid! It’s me!

For long minutes, Katya flew and scanned. The red winks from the ground grew fewer, the Germans got tired of shooting at a noisy but fleeting shadow. She banked right, to change her pattern to a figure eight and fly closer to the fortified village. She leaned so far out of the cockpit the wind almost whipped the goggles from her face.

She began to hear her own heartbeat louder than the engine. One more minute churned past. Vera’s voice came from far away, behind the motor and wind, the pounding of her heart, and the silence of Leonid.

‘Katya.’

A white sparkle punctured the even darkness on the ground. Her first thought was someone was lighting a fuse, as if to fire an old-fashioned cannon up at them. She turned the plane broadside to the light and banked to circle it just as it vanished. She kept her eyes on the spot; seconds later, the sparking flash came back, disappeared again, then returned.

Was this Leonid?

Katya whipped the plane directly at the light and it flicked on and off once more. It must be Leonid! Of course! He couldn’t send up a flare, a German patrol would spot that, too, and home in on him. He was flashing a flare on the ground, covering it with a bucket or something. Katya checked her altitude: one thousand feet. She pushed in the throttle and flicked off the magnetos. The engine coughed and quit.

‘What are you doing?’ Vera asked.

Katya did not answer. She let the U-2 glide for ten seconds. This was the hallmark – the broomstick – of the Night Witches. Leonid, if it was him, would know and answer.

He did. The flare appeared, then blinked out.

Katya fired up the propeller, the plane had fallen to eight hundred feet. The flare glimmered from a mile away to the west. Leonid must have left his wrecked plane, to hide in the fields. He’d known she would come.

She tried to keep her vision glued to the spot in the dark canvas where she believed he was, but taking her eyes from the ground for a moment to check her dials, Katya lost the location. Vera, the steady navigator, did not lose the bearing.

‘Left. More. More. There! Straight ahead. Go get him, Katya.’

Katya’s mind raced with the plane. Leonid would have moved to a field he knew would be suitable for her to land in. She had faith in this; he was a pilot himself, and like his captain said, a clever lad. The U-2 needed very little runway, less than four hundred feet. She could swoop in, stop, bring him onboard, then turn and roar out for safety. Yes! They would do it! There, a half-mile ahead, was another flare. This one did not blink but glowed fiercely, a landing light!

Katya swung the U-2’s nose right at the beacon. She dropped altitude for a fast and abrupt landing. There was no time to do a fly-by and check out the conditions of the field; she had to trust Leonid for that. Her heart climbed into her throat with the approaching ground, five hundred feet below and closing. One hand juggled the stick, the other adjusted the throttle; she put out her senses to determine the direction of the wind, it seemed light and at her back. Her feet stayed ready at the rudders.

The flare gleamed straight ahead. This close to the ground, she could discern the shapes of trees to her left and right, and behind the flare spread a flat dark swath of ground. Leonid had done his job. Now she did hers.

At three hundred feet off the field, she was still coming in hot. She had time to bleed off the last of her speed in the thousand feet before she lifted the nose and laid down the wheels. She pointed at the white flare, aiming to touch down just past it, Leonid would have set it at the leading edge of the runway. She felt a thrill, not just for the return of Leonid but for the heroic feat of all this, the podvig. Her hands and toes kept the plane reined tight, she leaned forward in these last seconds, into the mane of the airplane.

In that moment another, smaller flash lured her eyes away from the flare to her extreme right. Blinks of crimson glittered from a stand of trees silhouetted against the night. In that one swift glance, Katya knew. A German patrol had followed the sparking flare and the pops of her engine. Enemy soldiers were running at her, firing.

She sped past the flashes; there was still time to get on the ground, collect Leonid, and get away. The flare was ten seconds ahead. She slipped in the throttle, easing her airspeed, then pulled on the stick to lift the nose and slow her approach, but instead of responding the stick surged on its own to the left. The plane dipped and banked. She lost a moment in surprise, then hauled back too late and not enough, now the plane’s descent was sideways and too steep.

‘Vera, let go!’ she screamed into the intercom. ‘You’ll make us crash! Let go!’

The stick did not free into Katya’s struggling hands. She shouted at Vera but no answer came into her ears or her straining grip.

Katya was afraid to take her eyes off the expanding ground but she had to see why Vera was gripping the stick. There were only a few seconds remaining in which to right the plane. She whirled at her navigator. The girl was slumped. Her head lolled against her chest. Vera’s body was crumpled in her harness and her leg lay across the stick, shoving it to the left. In the right wall of the fuselage, lit by the little green light of the dials, a diagonal line of holes was punched through the fuselage. Each was matched by a black rip in Vera’s flight suit.

Katya screamed again, ‘Vera!’ The feat that had lain only seconds away became a panic. She could not reach Vera’s body, could not take her hand off the stick even for a moment, the ground was too close, her speed still too great. Frantic, she shoved against Vera’s bent head. The dead girl would not lay back. She had no time to mourn; battling the stick and Vera’s weight against it, Katya fought her shock and the dread rising in her fast with the ground.

If she could level out and pull up, Vera would fall backward off the stick. Leonid would hear her fly off, he’d run from the Germans to another field. She could circle and come back.

If.

Katya looked at the rising dark earth. She yanked a final time on the dead stick. No, she thought. No. She went rigid in the cockpit against this fate.

The port wings grazed the ground first, cartwheeling the fuselage. The left wheel touched down, then bounded into the air. The tail leaped behind her, the propeller and engine smacked the earth, drilling into the soft loam and snapping to a halt. Her goggles went blank with dirt, her brain curtained black with concussion. One last thought streaked through the collapse of her life: Vera is dead, Leonid is lost, and I am dead; goodbye to Papa and Valentin. She felt dismay that it all could be summed up and done so quickly.

She opened her eyes. No sound or light told her she was alive until one of the U-2’s wire struts broke with a comic sproning. Her head was too heavy to lift. She faced the ground, which jumped with uneasy shadows. Katya turned her throbbing head enough to see a flare on the ground, and the curtain parted, memory pierced her. The U-2 had not been pulverized in the crash but somehow had come to rest standing on its engine like a dart flung into the earth. She was suspended in her harness. Vera was dead in the cockpit behind her. Ah, Vera.

Leonid’s flare hissed, she tasted its smoke blown at her. Where was he?

Katya’s chin hung against her chest. The number of her predicaments flooded in on her; riding this awareness came pain. She fumbled with her safety belts but could not muster the strength in either hand to pull the catches. Both shoulders felt wrenched out of joint; her head seemed ready to snap off her body from the ache rising through her neck.

The flare began to fizzle, its time almost done. Katya sensed the weight of Vera dangling at her back. She tried again to get out of the wreckage, pushing back her pain to work her hands on the buckles.

In the last sizzles of the flare, a knife appeared beneath her throat.

The German patrol! They’d come to finish off the Night Witch! No, no, Katya thrashed her head and arms, she kicked her feet in horror, the pain in her body forgotten. No!

‘Calm down, calm down,’ a male voice urged. The words were Russian. It was Leonid! ‘Sit still, damn it!’

The blade withdrew. A strong hand went into Katya’s hair and yanked up her head to see. The face that slid close to hers was dirty and unshaven, yellow teeth flickered in the dying flare.

‘I’m going to cut you out of here. Do you understand me?’

Katya tried to speak but her throat stayed clamped in hurt and the ebb of her terror. She tried to say Vera’s name.

The face issued an order to someone else. ‘Kick some dirt on that fucking flare, fast!’

Instantly, the white light went out. The hand that gripped her head by the hair let go. Katya heard a snipping sound, several hands pushed up on her in the cockpit and she was released into them past the shreds of the slashed belts.

‘Can you walk?’ The hands lowered her out of the cockpit. They tried to put her on her feet. Her knees buckled. Dark shapes did not let her hit the ground.

‘Her,’ she mumbled. ‘Get her.’

‘No time,’ the voice answered. ‘You two carry this one. Let’s go.’

Before she could protest, she was dragged away from her plane. The tops of her flight boots scraped over the ground. The three men smelled of wool, sweat, and grass. The sourness of gun oil rose from their backs, where their carbines were strapped.

‘Leonid. Where…?’

The man hurrying on her left, short and burly under her arm, answered. ‘He ran away before we could find him. We weren’t expecting you to swoop in like that.’

No, Katya thought. Leonid wouldn’t have done that. He would have run to the plane the moment it crashed, he would have gotten me out of the wreck. He would have gotten Vera out.

‘He…’ she forced the words out, to defend Leonid, ‘…wouldn’t run away’

She felt the partisan’s heavy shoulder shrug under her weight. ‘Then the Germans got him.’

July 3 0120 hours Wehrmacht train north of Khar’kov, near the Ukraine-Russian border the Russian steppe

A knock sounded on Luis’s compartment door. He snapped awake. His sleep was never deep anymore, this frail frame he despised needed only shallow rest.

‘Yes.’

‘A message for you from the engineer, sir.’

Luis pulled his heels off the bench across from him. He stood and arranged his uniform. No trooper would see him in disarray, he was a Waffen SS Captain. His father had always told him the power is in the performance.

He slid the cabin door all the way back. The soldier seemed surprised, expecting the door to be only cracked at this time in the morning, not to encounter such alertness.

‘Give it to me, Private.’

‘Yes, sir. Good morning, sir.’

Luis took the folded sheet without looking down, keeping his eyes glued to the young grenadier’s face. Was there any hint of surprise on the boy at the gaunt white form who’d opened the door? No. Good. Luis nodded and the soldier clicked his heels in attention. Bearing, thought Luis. Bearing. This soldier could snap me in half if he had a mind to, but I can make him jump off this moving train with a word.

Luis opened the page. The private waited.

He read the one-line message, then looked the soldier up and down. Strong boy, he thought, big blond lad. But the soldier was not German. The insignia on his collar and sleeve revealed he was Czech. He and Luis had this in common, they were non-Germans serving in the SS. Because of their massive losses, the SS was recruiting outside Germany. Standing here on this rattling train deep in Russia, blond and dark, were two samples of the reach of Hitler’s ambitions.

Luis patted the boy’s arm.

‘Tell the engineer to stop the train.’

The soldier set his jaw, a love of taking orders was clear. Looking at him, Luis thought: This boy has not been to Russia before. The soldier said, ‘Yes, sir!’ and left. Luis reached back for his cap, nestled it on his head, and walked to the next compartment. He knocked.

‘Major Grimm.’

Behind the door, a sleepy throat snorted and coughed.

‘Yes. Yes, who is it?’

‘Captain de Vega.’

‘Captain. What time is it?’

‘Open up, please, Major.’

‘Yes. A moment.’

The major slid back the door only inches, disheveled, the plat of hair he combed over his wispy pate hung below his ear. Luis saw he was barefoot and in his undershirt.

‘Do you have a sidearm, Major?’

‘What?’

‘A weapon, sir. Do you have a gun with you?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Please strap it on and come with me.’

The fat officer sighed, then nodded, resigned. ‘Give me a…’

The major started to close the door to dress but Luis gave him a displeased glance, that he would not care to linger outside a shut door, waiting. The major slid the door full open and turned to his task.

The car jerked to the squealing of brakes, the train slowed and stopped. Under the gasps of steam from the locomotive, the officer donned his pants, tunic, and boots. Out of a travel case he took his Luger pistol and holster and buckled them on. He asked no questions.

Luis led him down the hall to the passenger car door. He spoke over his shoulder. ‘As ranking officer on this train, I thought I should alert you, Major. I’ve received a radio message that the tracks are broken ahead at the Oktabrskaya station. We cannot get through just yet. I’ve ordered the train to a halt.’

Luis stepped out of the train onto the rail mound. The major clambered down behind him.

‘Why are we stopping out here in the middle of…’

‘Shhh, Major. Please.’

The train stood still, the locomotive continued its heavy metal breath, waiting for the order to continue. On either side of the tracks stretched a field, without trees or bushes. His ears caught nothing, not the rustle of a leaf or the shush of a breeze, so vast was the open land, just a flat earth black with unmown grasses.

‘They won’t come here.’

‘Who won’t come here?’ the major asked.

‘The partisans.’

‘Partisans?’

‘They’re trying to stop this train, Major.’

Something in Luis’s flat tone kept the major from further queries. The officer’s bare head pivoted up and down the empty tracks, he seemed suddenly aware he was alone outside the train car with only a skinny SS captain and their two pistols. The notion of partisans was a fearsome one, bearded wild men in civilian clothes who fought with abandon, with vengeful crudeness and animal cunning. They were natives who knew every inch of the land and had the local populace to abet them. But there’s no danger right here, Luis thought. He’d seen enough ambushes, set a few himself, to know when and where they were likely Not here, without cover to attack and retreat. No, they’re waiting somewhere ahead. There will be trees beside the tracks and they’ll come out of them.

Luis lifted his nose, sipping the night air, calculating. The major asked, ‘How do you know this?’

‘The SS has received reports over the past few days that the Russians would try to bomb the Oktabrskaya train station. This they did tonight, apparently quite well. Blowing up the station was just a delaying tactic, Major, to slow the train in case the first partisan attack fails. While we wait for the tracks to be mended, they’ll have time to organize another ambush.’

The major fidgeted. ‘Another ambush?’

‘Yes. After the one tonight.’

‘Tonight?’

The major was repeating things again, but Luis grew patient now that he knew what was going to happen. The engineer had followed his instructions and alerted him when the train approached Slatino, ten miles south of the Ukraine border with Russia, twenty miles south of Oktabrskaya.

Luis eased his voice and said, ‘Yes. That’s why I’m here.’

The officer cocked his head at Luis.

‘You may get back on board, Major. I’ll join you shortly.’

Major Grimm turned on the sooty rocks. He climbed the steps back into the passenger car.

From the steps he asked, ‘How did you know, Captain de Vega?’

Luis nodded into the vast darkness of the Russian steppe.

Yes, he thought, let’s begin, and he harkened back to the huge silence of the plaza when the bull first enters the ring.

‘I know, Major, because we have infiltrated the partisans.’

July 2 0200 hours

Luis ate only half of the bratwurst sandwich. He offered the rest of it to the engineer. The man declined, making a face to indicate he was too nervous to eat.

Luis looked around the locomotive compartment. It was not unlike the innards of a tank with all its dials and handles, everything made of metal and glass, but roomier. He admired the power of the big, pulsing machine to pull the immense weight trailing behind them. With a smile he considered how easily any one of his Tiger tanks straddling these tracks could shoot this locomotive into the ditch. But he did not say this, he was not feeling competitive. The engineer was executing his job well and with discipline, doing what Luis told him to do. The man did not also have to be brave.

Luis kept watch on the terrain beside the tracks. Major Grimm had wanted to wait until morning to continue but Luis made the decision to keep going the rest of the way under the cloak of night, a trainload of new Tigers would be ripe for a Soviet air attack. Besides, this was his train, his first assignment back on active duty, and it was going to arrive at Oktabrskaya at sunup, as scheduled, even if the station there was in shambles.

‘That’s enough,’ he told the engineer. The man worked his levers and cords and the train slowed with a tremendous sigh. When it was stopped, Luis climbed down onto the rails, his Luger in one hand, a flashlight in the other. From one of the troop cars, a soldier climbed down and waited. Luis flashed his light at the soldier once, the soldier flashed back.

Luis walked ahead. The train panted in stillness behind him. He trod the rail mound leaving the flashlight off, fixing his gaze on the racks; this was the third time in the twenty kilometers since Slatino he’d escorted the train through a passage of trees lining the rails. The scanty body he was trapped in made almost no sound walking the ties, his balance was so good he could stay on a single rail for a hundred meters before stepping off. His night vision was remarkable. He was sharp, like his nickname, cutting through the night.

The partisans will come with fifty men, he thought. That was the SS intelligence.

Somewhere close to the Ukraine border. He paused and turned back to the unseen train a half mile behind him now. He blinked his flashlight twice. He knew without seeing that the soldier he’d stationed a quarter mile between himself and the train was signaling with another flashlight for the train to move forward. In response to the signal, Luis heard only a distant heave of steam.

The phalanx of trees was at least another mile long. The woods appeared to him as a jagged edge of deeper night, like the blackest paper roughly torn and pasted beside the tracks. He walked, head down, considering the partisan plan, filling in the gaps of his knowledge with what he would do in their position. Fifty men with small-arms, on foot, would wait in the trees. They’ll expect the train to come barreling past. When it does, they’ll blow the track under the locomotive or perhaps under one of the troop cars. The train will derail and the partisans will rush in a single wave out of their cover, across fifty meters of open ground on either side. Many cars will be upended, the garrison will be stunned or injured. They’ll engage in a quick and fierce firefight. In the midst of the shooting, they’ll head for the tanks with more explosives to spike the cannon barrels. Then the partisans will melt back into the steppe, and Luis will make his return to his SS division Leibstandarte by reporting the death of the ten Tigers that were under his protection.

Luis stopped. He turned a full circle on the rails and tingled. He’d walked into the place where he would have set the snare were he the one lying in ambush. A curve in the tracks. A band of trees on both sides of the rails. Wide fields behind them, no villages close by. Luis cast his gaze into the brush and branches left and right, and peopled the dark with twenty-five dirty faces per side, breaths held, fifty fingers on triggers. He walked another dozen quiet steps, sensing the Russians’ anger; in the darkness he pitched his own wrath against theirs, and in the spark that was made when the two met and struck, he saw the explosive.

He froze on the track. The train was far back and puffing, waiting for his signal to come forward. The partisans would be waiting just ahead, expecting the train’s momentum to carry it past the point of the tracks they intended to blast, toppling the cars in front of them. Perhaps they haven’t heard the train yet; Luis himself could barely make out the huffing locomotive.

He hoped they hadn’t seen or heard him, either.

He bent low, approaching the mine with five careful strides. Wedged sideways between the tracks was a fat log, like a damsel tied there in the night. Luis knelt beside it, feeling the bark, listening into the darkness for the sound of boots coming to draw a knife across his scrawny neck. With exploring fingers, he determined the nature of the bomb. Jammed between one end of the wooden trunk and the left-hand rail were two bars of C-3 explosive, two and a quarter pounds of the stuff smashed between the wood and the steel. Luis skimmed fingers across the putty lumps of plastique, feeling for the blasting caps; there would be two, wired together in case one failed. He found them and pulled his hand away; blasting caps were notoriously volatile, far more than the C-3 itself.

Luis admired the cleverness of the partisans. The section of tree trunk had been laid between the tracks as tamping for the explosive. When the C-3 blew, only one track would be severed, the one on the inside of the curve. This rail would break to the side, not up. The tram cars leaning around the bend in the tracks would derail to the inside of the curve, and because one set of wheels would be lower, the cars would spill over.

Luis saw the single electric cord running to the blasting caps. The slender wire ran left, straight into the trees in front of him. This was not good. The partisans were right there, forty meters away. Slowly, he put his Luger pistol in the hand holding the flashlight, and reached his empty hand into a tunic pocket for his wire cutters.

He dropped the Luger.

The thing clattered, metal tattle-tale on the big granite stones of the rail mound. Luis wasted not a second. He clutched the wire cutter and snipped the wire, felt the wire coil away from the blasting caps, then pulled the caps out of the C-3 as quickly as he dared. Once the explosive was disarmed – the detonators were out in seconds but to Luis it seemed an hour – he jumped to his feet and took this new physique of his on its first flat-out run.

He turned on the flashlight and blinked it three times into the darkness that swallowed the train. This was a different signal. Then he threw the flashlight away and drove his arms and legs as fast as he could. It was good to hear his boots were not always so silent; this time they tore down the rail ties with blaring purpose.

The first shots sounded in the trees. He could not tell how close the bullets came to him, he was running and huffing so hard he would have to get hit by a bullet before he would know if they had a bead on him. He ran down off the rail ties into the grass; it made no sense to race straight down the tracks, it made him too easy a target. More reports cracked out of the trees on both sides. Luis reproached himself for a clumsy ass, dropping the pistol like that. He ran on, exhilarated, laughing with manic gasps at every shot fired behind him that missed; he was too thin to be much of a target.

The waist-high grass beside the rail mound did not slow him. Like running on the moon, he thought, pumping his knees and elbows; whipped-up pollen flew in his face, a night breeze brushed his puffing cheeks. But what speed, he thought, where is the gravity of the world now?

He lost count of the shots the partisans fired at him. He wasn’t worried about being wounded, they never got a clear look at him in his speeding black uniform. He just wanted to get back to the train fast, before the partisans could repair the cut wire and blow the track anyway, settling for that little victory and making their escape. Luis had more planned for them.

The soldier shined his flashlight at Luis coming up out of the grass. Luis stopped and turned back up the tracks. He controlled his breathing as best he could to be quiet, to hear if they were still shooting or even following. He heard nothing.

From the other direction came the train, rushing to where they stood. This soldier had done his job. When Luis flashed him three times, he was to summon the train.

‘Captain, are you alright?’ the soldier asked.

‘Yes,’ Luis huffed. ‘They… uh…’ he took a deep breath and blew it out, ‘…they spotted me. But I found it. I cut the wire…’

‘Are they following you, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

The soldier unshouldered his submachine-gun.

‘You go back to the train, Captain. I’ll keep them off you.’

Luis took one more moment to look this boy over, the Czech one who’d delivered the message to his compartment an hour ago. This is why the SS is running out of men, Luis thought.

‘No, Private. Stay with me. You’ll get your chance in another minute.’

The train rumbled up to them. The two ran alongside. Luis climbed onto the ladder to the locomotive. He stuck his head into the compartment. ‘Keep this speed, no faster,’ he shouted to the engineer. Then he dropped off the ladder and let the train haul the first of the passenger cars to him. He beckoned the Czech grenadier to follow, then matched the pace of the car and jumped aboard.

He entered the car. Fifty SS troopers huddled in the seats; helmets, boots, belts, and barrels creaked and rattled with the joggling of the slow-moving train. Several of the soldiers snored.

‘Up,’ Luis said. A few leaped to their feet; the jangling noise animated the rest.

‘Now,’ Luis said.

In seconds the men lined up like paratroopers in an airplane to leap from the passenger car doors. Luis turned to enter the next car.

‘Up,’ he said.

When he had done this in all four cars, issuing two hundred trained grenadiers onto the rail mound, he jumped down the tracks, the Czech soldier at his heels. The train engineer, though a fearful man, had not sped the train up one jot.

When his own passenger car rolled past, Luis saw the major peering out the open window of his own cabin.

Luis waved. ‘You’re going to miss the fun, Major.’

Grimm held up both palms to Luis and shouted down, ‘Wait!’ He disappeared from the window. Luis envisioned the fat officer scrambling in his dark compartment for his socks and boots to scoot off the train before it reached the partisans and their booby-trap.

The train ambled by. When the flatbeds carrying the Tigers came up, he called to the guards on the first car: ‘Ready’

Two of the guards jumped from the flatbed over to the connected car, which was covered by a tarp. With Luis and the Czech private watching, the guards slipped the ropes holding the canvas sheath. The tarp flapped in the moving wind and fell away from a sandbagged machine-gun position. The two guards leaped in behind the gun, primed the ammo belt in the breech, and slid by toward the partisans, pivoting the barrel left and right, ready just as Luis had commanded and planned. When the last car in the train rattled by carrying the second tarp-covered pillbox, Luis gave the same signal. The soldiers sprang to their assignment.

Luis and the Czech stood behind the slowly receding train. The major trundled to the end of the steps and held on, hesitant to jump down to the moving ground, then hopped off, almost stumbling on the rocks. Luis looked at the Czech. The boy was eager like a dog, to fetch, to chase.

‘Go,’ Luis said, releasing him with his voice and an open hand. The boy ran off behind the train, to get his portion of the kill.

Luis strolled behind the train, over the tracks he’d run across just two minutes before. He walked over to the major, caught his elbow and walked him forward along the tracks.

‘Shouldn’t we stay back here?’ the major asked, confused and apprehensive.

‘It’s safe, Major.’

To punctuate this, small-arms fire erupted out of the night from up the tracks. Luis walked beside the officer, listening and calculating when the train would pass beyond the partisans’ defused bomb. Gunfire spurted on both sides of the rail line, automatic weapons unleashed their rat-tat-tat, then gave way to single reports, then nothing. It was over. The train was safe.

‘What did you do?’ Major Grimm inquired. The man walked with both hands clasped behind his back, buttoned and belted belly out. His double chin hid part of his collar. Luis felt a twinge of vexation at this Wehrmacht officer, who carried on him as extra all the weight Luis had sacrificed, who cowered in his compartment until even that became unsafe, while others – SS men all – ran ahead into the dark to engage the enemy.

‘Once I found the place where the partisans wanted to blow the tracks, I cut the wire to their explosive. Clever idea they’d come up with, to wreck only one rail and spill the train on its side. They spotted me at the last second and I ran back to the train.’

‘Those were the first gunshots, then. Them shooting at you?’

Nothing was said about the dropped Luger. Luis caught himself drawing up his posture, gaunt shoulders back, he took longer strides, the peacock walk of the matador. He had lain in hospital beds for months, tottered with canes for more months, suffered in sanitary surroundings through seasons of battle news from the front, and now this night marked his return to the war. Luis preened and strolled and talked.

‘In addition to escorting the Tiger tanks, I’m also bringing a company of reinforcements to Leibstandarte. Once I was sure where the partisans were located, I sent each of the four platoons ahead. Two platoons were ordered to take positions between the tracks and the trees. Two more were to penetrate the woods and come out behind the Russians in the fields. The train drove between them. The Tigers were protected by twin machine-gun redoubts on rail cars.’

‘The tarpaulins.’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah, I wondered what was under those sheets.’

‘Guns, Major.’

‘Yes, of course. Well, this is a war. What does one expect?’

‘Once the train was safe, the first two platoons entered the trees to flush the partisans away from the tracks and back toward the fields. When the Reds ran out from cover to disperse, the second platoons were waiting.’

‘It sounds like a quail hunt,’ the major said with approval.

‘Actually, a pincer action.’

‘Yes, well, it doesn’t matter. The tanks are safe. And so are we, I assume?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Good.’ The major clapped Luis on the back, celebrating his own closeness to danger and his survival in the graces of this little SS captain. There was something condescending in the slap on the back, Luis thought; it carried the flavor of a German officer thanking a Spaniard for a job well done in the service of Germany. There was also a hint of surprise, as though Luis were too much a runt to be this brave and effective.

They approached the place on the tracks where the partisans had set their bomb. The log was still smeared with the gray explosive on one side, the blasting caps and wire were helpless deposits beside the rail. Major Grimm studied the set-up and clucked his tongue.

The locomotive sighed in the dark around the bend. As per Luis’s instructions, the tram halted a half mile away. Dawn would overtake them in another hour. Luis would roll with his Tigers safe and on schedule into the ruins of the Oktabrskaya station. The rails there would be repaired before the day was out. The tanks were too valuable to leave them at a rail station thirty miles from the front.

The two hundred SS grenadiers he’d unleashed into the woods began to return to the tracks. They came crashing through the underbrush carrying the bodies of dead partisans, as they’d been instructed. One by one, the carcasses were tossed like sacks onto the slope of the rail mound. Luis walked along the line of bodies, the Germans laid them out spaced neatly. The partisans would be found like this. Their ruse to blow the tracks was discovered and averted. They might suspect they have a spy in their cell and tear themselves apart looking for him. Perhaps not. No matter. Even if they found the informant, he’d be easily replaced. The Gestapo were masters of persuasion.

He walked the line of corpses. He expected to see many forms of one man, the simple Russian peasant roused to fight the European invader, knobby-handed laborers, shaggy beards and moustaches under close-cropped hair, tattered clothes and savage expressions even in death. These freshly killed ones were civilized, and Luis found that odd. These partisans were not starved, their clothes were not ragged. The weapons collected by the grenadiers were first-rate, front-line rifles, oiled and loaded. A handful of the partisans had been young men, perhaps soldiers slipped into the conquered lands to provide the partisan cells with professional training and leadership. Most were older, with determined looks frozen on them in repose. Luis kicked the boots of one; these were new boots, good leather all around.

Major Grimm came to his side.

‘They’re getting stronger,’ the major observed.

Luis nodded. He’d been briefed that the Russian partisan movement was disorganized, tattered. These corpses gave the lie to that intelligence. These men lying shoulder to shoulder on the gravel had been supplied, supported, led, emboldened. Their kind of fury was fed by the harshness of Germany’s occupation, the stench from the death camps, and the lunacy of taking these people lightly, something Luis had sworn long ago he would not do again.

Thirty-six bodies were lined up. Luis saw the determination and efficiency of the SS troopers daubed somewhere on each one, each corpse a quick tale; a short run to somewhere ended in being shot down. A wound in the neck, several in the chest or abdomen, many coats had no rents, their bullets were in the back. At the end of the row of partisans lay one SS soldier. Over him stood the Czech private.

‘Your friend?’ Luis asked.

The young soldier nodded. The dead grenadier, too, had the Czech flag on his sleeve. One stained rip dotted the dead boy’s jacket, the hole darker than any night.

‘Go get the train,’ Luis ordered the soldier. ‘Tell the engineer to come back.’

The soldier said, ‘Yes, sir.’ With what seemed like no effort he reached down for his comrade and slung the corpse across his shoulder. He walked off down the rail ties with his cooling burden.

A sergeant from one of the platoons presented himself to Luis and the major beside him.

‘Report, Sergeant,’ Luis instructed.

‘A few got away, sir, no more than four or five. But we’ve got these here who surrendered.’

Behind the sergeant stood three partisans. These men hung their heads, making Luis think of a bull when he and the picadors were done with it. But these men were captive and afraid and for Luis that was their difference from the bulls, animals that were never afraid. He moved close to the three. They smelled. He curled his nose at fear and dirt, cheap wool and vodka. He never hated the bulls when he fought them, he and every man inside the ring respected and loved the beasts for their courage and how hard they died. He tried to keep his anger from quaking his hand when he held it out for the sergeant’s pistol. The soldier laid the gun in Luis’s palm.

‘Turn them around,’ he directed the sergeant. The soldier obeyed.

Luis barely looked at them. He’d had more curiosity for the dead ones lined along the rail mound, the ones who died fighting. These three surrendered.

Luis dispatched the first one. The single shot to the back of the head pitched the partisan forward. The report flew off into the fathomless night. The partisan crumpled across the tracks. One of the grenadiers hauled the body back by the feet, aligning it tidily with the rest of the corpses.

The second partisan whimpered. Luis stepped back and shot him from an outstretched arm, to put as much distance between himself and this weeper as he could. This one did not even tumble forward but collapsed at the knees, so weak was he. Another soldier straightened the body.

Luis walked behind the third. He raised his pistol. The man turned around to face him, not lifting his eyes to the Luger aimed at his forehead but glaring deep into Luis’s sockets. Luis saw a sneer; the partisan was enjoying what had been done to this SS man he now eyed, the flesh stripped off him by the war made on Russia. The partisan licked his lips, dry, under clean-shaven cheeks. He was old, this one, he’d seen enough life, time to balance it out with death. He challenged Luis by turning around. He mocked him by speaking.

‘Rodina,’ the partisan said.

Luis felt alone with the partisan, enfolded by night out here on a stretch of Russian rail. The man had said ‘Motherland.’ His eyes were final, not just for himself but for Luis and the whole war. Luis held the gun steady between the partisan’s eyes.

Slowly, with even more sureness than the partisan had mustered, he shook his own head. No, he told the man with the gesture; the finalness is yours alone.

He lowered the gun, handing it back to the sergeant. No one else moved, not the major nor any of the watching grenadiers.

In a flash, Luis grabbed the hilt of his SS knife. The blade leaped from its sheath. With a backhand stab, knuckles up, Luis drove the dagger into the side of the partisan’s neck. The knife embedded where it was intended, missing the carotid artery and striking between the vertebrae to slice the spinal cord. Luis yanked the blade out and the partisan fell like a puppet with its strings cut. The glare on the man’s face was wiped away.

Luis looked to the sky. The sun was beginning to rise. He knelt to swipe his knife on the partisan’s pant leg, then slid the blade back into its scabbard.

He issued no orders for the soldiers to follow, but walked away past the line of bodies, toward the waiting train. The men tramped after him, wordless, rifles clanking in their arms and across their backs. He didn’t look down at the partisans, there was no more curiosity, death made every man the same.

Major Grimm caught up to him at the head of the company. Luis still felt the life of the defiant partisan throb in his hand, a powerful sensation, like a heartbeat. The major wanted to talk, it seemed, but Luis did not oblige. He reached into a pocket for a packet of crackers to appease his hunger.

July 2 0210 hours west of Tomarovka

Even half conscious, Katya could still ride.

The three dark partisans who’d cut her from her downed U-2 had horses tied at the nearby farm of a peasant. Four mounts waited, the spare was to have been for Leonid.

She needed help climbing into the saddle. Her ribs and hips all felt clobbered, every muscle seared. The old peasant looked her over while handing a bag of food up to one of the partisans. He asked, ‘Is this the pilot you came to rescue? A woman?’ The partisan took the parcel and replied, ‘No.’

One of the men grabbed the reins to guide her horse. Katya drew the leather back into her own hands and told him, ‘Ride.’

The three partisans wheeled their mounts. The peasant continued his distasteful glare at Katya, as though he’d risked his life stashing these horses for the partisans to salvage nothing more than some fragile female. She managed one good kick in her horse’s ribs and lit out behind them into the darkness.

They rode for an hour, stopping at every sound in the night. The horses were well trained, accustomed to stealth, they did not nicker or stomp. The three men did not talk to Katya, they seemed angry with her. She did not ask questions. She was in a new slipstream, swept off in the current of unexpected events and people. She clung to the horse by instinct, for her hands and knees could barely clutch. Her mind staggered between blows: in one moment pain, in the next dead Vera left behind, in another Leonid lost or captured, then fear, then again pain.

One of the partisans was the leader of their little group. He rode in front and set the tone and pace. They stayed out of the open fields and away from every building, creeping along the gaps between tree lines. The Germans in this area kept themselves murky, only a few distant campfires were spangles on the darkness, one set of headlights on a far-off dirt road glimmered and vanished. The four riders came to a stream. The leader raised a hand for them to stop. He dismounted and waved the others from their horses. Leading his horse, he moved into the calf-deep water. Katya swung her leg across the saddle. She heard herself moan, the ground became the sky, galaxy-filled. She fainted.

July 2 Noon in a field south of Borisovka

Rain dribbled on her forehead. Soft light played over her eyelids. The grass beneath her back felt soft and damp. Papa knelt beside her – was it Papa? – smelling of horse and steel, and close too was the youth of Valentin, an energy she could feel without seeing. A horse pawed, a leafy branch strayed between her shut eyes and the sky. She was home.

Katya opened her eyes. Gray light dodged through wet branches low over her face. She blinked, and that movement tripped off the pain in her joints. She groaned and turned her head.

‘So, this is a Night Witch.’

The voice tumbled from a squatting man, his elbows across his knees and his boot heels off the grass. His voice was deep, but no deeper than the eyes which were set in his sockets as if at the back of caves. They were black eyes under black brows, over hollow grim cheeks fletched with silver stubble. But he smiled and reached down a hand. Each finger was filthy with half-moons of dirt under the nails. He wore a charcoal wool suit coat and brown slacks. His shirt was forest green.

Katya took a deep breath; her ribs protested, making her wince. The squatting man shook the hand he held out. Katya took it. He pulled gently and she sat up.

‘There,’ he said. ‘All better, yes?’

‘No.’

She looked about. In addition to this stranger, thirty others sat oiling guns, eyeing the surrounding fields through the dripping leaves, or napping. An equal number of horses clustered around the trees where they were tethered.

‘Where am I?’

‘Three miles south of Borisovka. In a stand of trees. On your ass, where you’ve been for the last nine hours.’

Katya remembered stopping at the stream. Swinging her leg out of the saddle. The burst of stars.

‘I…’

‘You passed out. They brought you in across your saddle.’ The man pointed at three men standing behind him. ‘You’re a sound sleeper, Night Witch. What’s your name?’

The three came to loom over the kneeling partisan. She recognized them through the haze of her recollection; last night’s leader was an old one very like the man beside her, hardened, something vicious under the skin. The other two were younger, probably soldiers found behind enemy lines. One was thin, the other heavy. The skinny one was cold-eyed, not much more than twenty yet he looked wicked, a killer. The heavy one might have been her age, twenty-eight, with a blushed, full face like a red rising sun. This one’s manner was mercurial, with fleet eyes and a nervous, jiggling neck. Katya knew either of them, any of them gathered under these trees, would stick a dirk in her heart if they believed she was a threat to their unit.

‘Is there any water?’ she asked, holding her voice steady.

The heavy one handed down his canteen. He smiled with the gesture, then like a fish the smile darted from his lips.

She drank, then answered the kneeling man’s question. ‘Katerina Dimitriyevna Berkovna. Lieutenant, 208th Night Bomber Division.’

Katya tried to stand. The kneeling man stood and helped her. The fat one lent a hand, too. The other two held their ground and watched her struggle upright.

Once she was erect, before speaking, she made her peace with the wracking in her body. No bones were broken, but she knew beneath her flight suit she was a storm cloud of bruises.

She addressed the three partisans who’d saved her from the plane and the German patrol. ‘Thank you.’ They nodded, and the unspoken clung on their faces, a show of their dismay that it was Katya they had rescued and not the fighter pilot they’d been seeking at Tomarovka.

The deep-eyed man spoke for them. ‘I’m Colonel Plokhoi.’ This partisan called himself Colonel Bad. ‘You’re with a druzhiny of the Hurricane Brigade. Last night our cell had a radio alert that a Yak-9 was down in our region. My men went to bring the pilot back. They were about to meet him at the assigned location when you showed up to save him instead.’

‘Leonid Lumanov.’ Katya said the name so Leonid would not be known as ‘him.’ These partisans were like untamed bits of the earth itself, gloomy and weathered. She hurt a great deal standing here but not so much that she would drop her defiance and become the disappointing woman these four believed they’d lugged back. She was a pilot, like Leonid.

‘Lumanov,’ the colonel allowed her, nodding. ‘Well, when Lumanov struck his flare for you to land, the Germans saw him. As a result, you got shot down. Your pilot friend disappeared. And your navigator got killed.’

Katya winced. She wanted to say Vera’s name, too, to lay a grave marker on the cool words of this partisan. But Plokhoi was right. If she had stayed away, Leonid would be safe. Vera would be alive.

Katya fought the urge to hang her head in grief. Instead she kept her chin and her gaze firm; neither Vera nor Leonid would want her to show regret to these men. Vera had encouraged the rescue, her last words were ‘Go get him, Katya.’ And Leonid had lit the flare, preferring to be rescued by Katya and her little U-2 instead of the partisans. Yes, she was sorry for what happened, the loss and death, but for nothing more, not her own effort, not the bravery of Vera, not the faith of Leonid.

The three partisans who’d brought her back turned away now that she was awake and standing. The heavy-set one allowed a sympathetic smile before walking off. His thinner mate went to sit with some comrades, men who made no noise other than the sound of several whetstones under swirling blades, a hiss that blended with the patter of the rain.

Plokhoi jerked a thumb over his shoulder at his platoon. ‘They’ll be fine. Actually, they’ve got plenty to thank you for. We get a lot of supplies dropped to us by you Night Witches. By the way, were you in on bombing the station at Oktabrskaya last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then, you’ll be glad to know your part of the mission went well. The station and the tracks were wrecked, and the German garrison was hit hard.’

What did Plokhoi mean, ‘your part of the mission’? Then she understood. Plokhoi’s druzhiny must have been the partisan group assigned to work with the Night Witches to stop the German tank train.

Something had gone wrong.

‘Last night,’ Plokhoi said, ‘I had seventy-two men. I sent fifty of them after the train. Today I’ve got thirty-one left. The Germans were ready for us. The train got through to the station. It’ll reach Belgorod by tonight after the rails are fixed. And I don’t have enough men to go after it again.’

Katya rammed her thoughts through the crash, back to the mission over the Oktabrskaya train station. The night fighter had been waiting. As it had been three nights before that, at the sortie above the enemy supply depot. Again, the Germans had known the Night Witches were coming, where and when; the night fighter was there, too. Her Night Bomber squadron received its targets from intelligence gathered by the partisans. And what about last night’s attempt to rescue Leonid? A German patrol had been closing in at the same time Katya and Vera and the partisans reached him. Now Plokhoi said his partisans had been anticipated last night by the tank train. Their ambush was damned before it started.

She said nothing to Plokhoi about these facts, or her sudden suspicion that there might be a traitor in their number. Plokhoi must be aware, if he himself was not the traitor. She didn’t know the man from a stranger before waking up to him five minutes ago. A cold feeling seeped down her spine, as though raindrops had dripped into her flight suit. She cast her eyes over the surviving partisans. Which one was it?

Outside the copse of trees, the day was leaden. These partisans huddled like trolls from the daytime. The steppe must be a poor landscape for guerilla fighters, not like a mountain wood or a swamp, where it would be easier to hit and disappear. These men had not many places to hide in the Kursk region, a few dispersed villages, some small forests, but the rest was flat, ranging farmland. Secrecy was their survival. Katya knew in an instant it would be hers, as well.

Plokhoi offered a cigarette. She shook her head.

‘We’ll get you out of here tonight,’ he said, looking up through the leaves, invoking darkness, the only time his cadre could move. ‘I’ll radio your Witches to come pick you up.’

‘No,’ Katya said.

She didn’t trust this Colonel Bad and his radio. More important, she didn’t know Leonid’s fate. She and Vera had come looking for him, and she hadn’t yet found him. He might have been captured, but he might still be free and close by.

And if there was a spy in this partisan cell, she had a debt to pay him. For the four dead Witches. For Vera. And maybe for Leonid.

Besides, the partisans had horses. She said to Plokhoi, ‘I’m staying.’

July 2 1915 hours

Plokhoi assigned the three who’d rescued Katya to stay with the Witch. He would not call her by her name or rank. Katya did not insist. She let it go – after all, she thought, this was a person who’d anointed himself Colonel Bad. She wondered what kind of man he’d been before the Germans invaded. A professor, perhaps, or a gentleman bandit. The dirt on him spoke of stamina and ruthlessness, this was not a man who led from behind. He was charismatic; the others nodded when he spoke and never broke their eyes from him. Colonel Bad reminded Katya of a quieter version of her father.

The three partisans introduced themselves, then let her rest in the deepening shade for the whole of the afternoon. When she sat up, the rain had ended, leaving a spongy humidity under the trees. The thin one brought her water. His name was Daniel. The heavy one approached with a tin of dry biscuits. His name was Ivan. The older man, their squad leader, tossed a pair of men’s trousers, a wrinkled tunic, and a thin wool coat on the ground to replace her green flight suit. He walked off and sat near but with his back to them, gazing out through the trees. Josef was his name.

Big Ivan settled next to her and took a few of the biscuits for himself. Daniel folded like a jackknife, his long legs tucked under him.

‘I’m sorry for the men you lost last night,’ she told them. Both lowered their eyes. Ivan muttered that he was sorry they couldn’t get the body of the other Witch out of her plane.

‘The Germans,’ he explained. ‘No time.’

What will happen to Vera? Katya wondered. The Germans will take her papers and maps and leave her body to rot. Villagers will come along to scavenge things from the wreck. They’ll bury her, and after the war there will be a memorial to Vera on the spot of the crash, a bust and a marble garden.

Katya thought, too, about the members of this fighting group killed in last night’s raid against the train. More than half of this druzhiny, gone. She wanted to ask if there’d been any word about what happened to Leonid, but she put that away for now. This was not the time to ask any of these men to address her concerns.

The mood under the trees was somber, even the horses stood still and dulled. So many lives taken all at once. The partisans sat without talking. Katya was tempted to warn the two young partisans who’d warmed up to her that their dead comrades might have been betrayed. She wanted to tell them how she, too, had lost friends to a possible traitor in their midst. She bit all this back. Daniel and Ivan carried the water and biscuit tin to Josef. He waved them off and kept his eyes on the patches of steppe showing through the wet branches.

Until dark, Katya sat alone. She changed into the new baggy clothes. Then she let her body rest, let Vera’s death sink far enough beneath her surface so she could continue on. That was what these partisans seemed to be doing, burying their dead in their hearts, making themselves accustomed to a world that was suddenly without their comrades. Silent and grieving, she watched the partisans sharpen and clean their weapons.

They were twelve miles from the front lines, but no enemy convoys or patrols came near their stand of trees. All daytime activity by the Germans seemed to have stopped. Plokhoi interpreted this to mean the battle would start soon.

After full night fell, Plokhoi led the remains of his band out of the trees. Katya hoisted herself gingerly into her saddle. The moon was shunted deep behind dense clouds as they rode, a shrouded midnight.

Katya rode in the thick of the pack, surrounded by Daniel, Josef, and Ivan. Her horse was sure-footed and strong, well fed. These partisans were obviously receiving supplies, with support and food from both the villages and the Night Witches’ air-drops. The men bristled with weapons and ammunition. Colonel Bad even had a radio, something very few partisan cells could boast. This must be a key group, and a good one, to operate right under the Germans’ noses like this. For them to fail so badly as they did against the tank train, something was rotten. Plokhoi must be aware of that.

They rode west, away from Borisovka. Daniel whispered to Katya that they were going to the villages to recruit, to regain their strength.

Somewhere in the night, Katya heard planes high up in the quilted clouds. Her spirit leaped for a moment, she closed her eyes to listen to the engines. These were not the popping motors of her night-bombing squadron on another mission. These were bigger planes, American-made Boston A-20s, and fighters, Yak-9S in escort.

Katya and all the partisans reined in their horses to watch the restive black world around them. Colonel Plokhoi sidled up next to her, a wild look in his eyes. Then, no more than five miles behind them, around Borisovka, the night blistered into orange and yellow flashes. She kept a tight rein on her horse, but the animal did not flinch at the bomb blasts and firelights. The horse was used to this.

Plokhoi wheeled his mount around to see the Soviet air raid better. He shouted over the explosions, unconcerned he might be heard by any Germans in the area.

Are you sure you don’t want to go home, Witch?’ He leaned closer to her. ‘I can smell it, you know, I can tell you!’

The partisan leader raised one arm into the air and shook a grimy fist.

‘Goddamn!’ he bellowed. ‘Goddamn, here it comes!’

July 3 0700 hours Vladimirovka beside the Oboyan road

Valentin’s boot tapped on Dimitri’s left shoulder. Then the hard toe nudged the nape of his padded helmet. Dimitri hauled back on the left lever and shoved the right one forward. The tank spun into a left-hand turn, slipping slightly, Dimitri sensed the mud under his treads. He brought the tank out of the turn and stomped the clutch, jamming the shift knob into fourth, the T-34’s highest gear. The transmission grumbled. Dimitri leaned down for his hammer but the General did not like to be struck and complied, the gears meshed. Dimitri floored the accelerator and the tank bounded along the ridge at thirty miles an hour, top speed.

All hatches were closed. Dimitri peered into a gash of gray-green and bouncing world through a small periscope. The designers of the T-34 didn’t put much stock in the discretion of the driver. His little, horizontal, mirrored view of the road made what bits he could see look like he was driving through a toy world. For the most part, the driver was forced to rely on his commander to tell him when and where to turn. Even the commander’s vision was limited; he sent his tank charging into a battle he, too, could barely observe. The commander peered through a periscope or a telescope, which provided him no more than a fourteen-degree-wide outlook, pressing his forehead and eyes against poor rubber pads that did little to keep light out of the optics. In addition he had one small armored port at shoulder height and a pistol port below that. Buttoned up like this, the T-34 was a collection of blind spots. Running this morning shut tight as a tin, the General’s insides were humid and smelly, piquant with perspiration and temper.

Valentin rested his feet on Dimitri’s shoulders, guiding the tank with his heels and toes because he was busy using the intercom for other duty. He was yelling at the loader Pasha.

‘No, no, no, the other bin! The other bin! I want AP! AP, Private! Get three ready. Now, do it, go, go!’

Dimitri kept the tank barreling ahead straight, listening to his son holler at the burly teenager while the boy scrambled for the ammunition. Pasha struggled on his knees, stripping back the neoprene matting that lay across the floor bins, digging down in them for the correct shells; this time Valya wanted solid-shot armor-piercing rounds. Somehow Pasha had managed to grapple from the floor the wrong ammo, a heat shell, a high-explosive antitank round. The T-34 carried seventy-seven rounds: nineteen of armor-piercing, fifty-three of high-explosive, and five of antipersonnel. Only nine of those rounds were easily accessible, on racks located left and right on the turret wall. Once those shells were expended, the loader had to root around under the floor mat into the eight storage bins beneath their feet. When the tank was moving at full speed, swaying and hopping the way it was now, the loader’s job was very difficult.

Valentin’s foot crunched into the middle of Dimitri’s neck. This meant stop, fast. Dimitri downshifted and hit the brakes. He brought the General to a skidding halt. No sense aggravating his testy son any more than he already was.

Valya’s voice swelled in the intercom. ‘Load AP!’

Behind and above Dimitri, Pasha rose from his knees to slam a shell into the breech. Valentin hit the electrical traverse and the turret began to whir and pivot. The turret walls, the dials, sights, and controls, the thick breech of the big main gun, all began to swing to the right. But Valentin’s and Pasha’s seats did not move. Valya’s feet left Dimitri’s shoulders, he had to stand and dance with the turret whenever he swung it around. This was a major design flaw in the T-34; the seats for the commander and loader were not mounted to the turret itself but to the ring of the chassis, so that the two had to skitter around with the swiveling breech and the firing controls whenever the turret was turned. Dimitri looked over his shoulder to watch his son. The boy contorted himself to keep his eye on his range telescope and at the same time twirl the elevation flywheel to raise the main gun to match his range to the target. At Valya’s feet, Pasha was folded again into the floor of the tank, he had the rubber mat in a shambles looking for two more AP rounds to satisfy his sergeant.

Metal clanged and the big boy began to rise with a shell cradled in his arms. Valentin lifted his right boot and laid the foot in the middle of the boy’s spine, forcing him back inside the bin.

Valentin had two foot pedals beneath his position, the left one for the 76.2 mm main gun, the right for the machine-gun mounted co-axially to the cannon. He kept his brow pressed against the padding above his telescope, his foot on Pasha’s squirming back. He turned the elevation wheel one more round, then stepped on the left pedal.

The big gun fired. The tank jolted with the blast, Dimitri wasn’t ready for it and knocked his padded head. Inside the tank, the breech rammed backward in its recoil, the metal slab just missed smashing Pasha’s head into pulp. A scalding casing popped out of the breech and clanged on the exposed bins. Valentin pulled his boot off the boy’s back to let him up. The casing rolled near Pasha’s cheek and he yelped, dropping the AP shell he held, making him dig frantically back into the bin to retrieve it. Sulphurous smoke backwashed down the breech into the cabin. The General’s ventilation system sucked at the fumes but with all the hatches secured drew them outside too slowly. Everyone coughed a little; quiet Sasha, crammed beside Dimitri at his gunner’s position, gagged.

The tank sat apprehensive, the diesel engine idled waiting for an order. Sasha kept his face at his own machine-gun vision block, a mirrored slit no bigger than Dimitri’s. Pasha sat up with the AP shell clutched to his chest, looking up at Valentin from bended knees. The turret traverse whined, spinning the main gun to face forward. Valentin glared tight-lipped through his optics to see if he’d hit his target, pirouetting with the green turret walls turning around him.

Dimitri gripped the handle over his head. He turned it and shoved the heavy metal hatch up. Sodden air tumbled in on him like a wet dog. He stood into the drizzly morning.

‘I need a piss break. Anyone?’

He laid his hands flat on the dripping armor and curled his feet up under him, to slide off the glacis plate to the trampled ground. The tank stank of exhaust, fumes from the fired AP shell still trickling out of its long muzzle, black diesel puffs issuing from its rear. Dimitri walked beside the T-34 and opened the fly on his coveralls. He waited for Valentin’s hatch to lift and a stream of abuse to fly at him. Instead, the floor escape hatch beneath the gunner’s position fell open and thin Sasha crawled from between the treads. The commander’s hatch rose. Valya climbed down the side of the tank and hopped off the treads. Round little Pasha followed. The four of them peed into the ground. The General, surrounded by its keepers, purred.

Dimitri finished and kept his eyes out over the steppe. Craters and scorched spit-up ground dotted the crest of a low hill a mile off. This spot was where the tanks of his 3rd Mechanized Brigade came to calibrate their cannons and season their new recruits, their own Sashas and Pashas. All the land here on the southern shoulder of the Kursk bulge rose slightly to the north, favoring the Russian defense; here, the steppe was so flat that even a slight elevation was an immense advantage. The Germans will have to run uphill in their opening assault. Another tank on a nearby crest let loose with a shell, the thing whistled and struck, blasting into one of the holes already scarring the ground out there. Dimitri let his imagination create the coming battle on the field and hills below. The thunder and last pattering rain from the fading storm, plus the crash of gunnery from the other tanks in his company, made a grim and real fabric with his conjuration of havoc and punctured metal, screaming shells and geysers of metal and men.

Valentin came beside him.

‘They’ll get us killed, Papa.’

‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ Dimitri kidded. ‘I was afraid all you Communists put no value on your own lives.’

Valentin ignored the jab. He fixed his eyes where Dimitri looked. Did Valya see the images? Did he perhaps see himself there, broken in the carnage?

‘I’m serious. These two got shit for training before they were sent here. They’ll get us killed.’

Dimitri expelled a breath. He winced up into the falling rain to release the vision of the battle, the image of his son dead below. Pasha and Sasha walked up.

‘I’m sorry, Sergeant,’ the loader said glumly. The boy had his sleeves rolled up above husky forearms. His skin was scraped raw from digging into the jiggling bins, several nails were blue from getting pinched between the jostling shells.

‘The sergeant says you’re going to get us killed, Pasha. You’re a Cossack now. Would you do that?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 3 0905 hours

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

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

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

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

Dimitri stretched out to kick Pasha and Sasha awake.

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

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

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

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

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

The two boys gaped, wide alert now.

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

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

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

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

Sasha asked, ‘Do the Germans have these?’

Dimitri couldn’t contain his laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 3 1240 hours Oktabrskaya train station

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Thank you, Major.’

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

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

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

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

Luis approached a sergeant.

‘Schneller!’ he said. Faster.

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

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

July 3 1845 hours Belgorod station

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

The company of grenadiers filed from the train and was met by its new captain. They marched away. The locomotive uncoupled and chugged off on a different line to lug another train back to the west. Major Grimm disappeared and did not say goodbye. Luis was not greeted by anyone, though the station bustled with people in uniform. No one came to congratulate him for arriving with the Tigers safely. He felt deserving of attention but was unnoticed.

The train yard was large and not ruined at all by bombs. He stood on the platform waiting, making himself easy to find should someone be looking for him with new orders and a pat on the back. He gazed over the skyline of the small city. Onion domes, crosses on spires, and water towers were visible against the overcast sky. Solid brick buildings without adornment made the character of the town humble and strong, Luis sensed it was very Catholic, and he liked Belgorod at the end of his long journey back into Russia. He thought this boded well for him. He cheered up and walked to the rear of the train to supervise the off-loading of the ten Mark VI Tigers, and the change from their narrow transport tracks to their wider combat treads.

He knew this work to be back-breaking; he’d watched the tan-colored Tigers loaded onto the train in Germany, and now the process had to be reversed. Crews of mechanics from Leibstandarte clustered around the tanks on their flatbeds, local rail operators assisted by uncoupling the cars one at a time. One mechanic lifted himself into the driver’s hatch of the Tiger at the end of the train. He cranked the engine, black exhaust spat from the pipes, and the thing roared and shook the whole flatbed car, so powerful was it even in starting. Others scrambled to lay reinforced ramps at the end of the car; somewhere deep in the Tiger’s guts the transmission clanked and the tank shuddered. It was like watching a behemoth come alive. The sprocketed wheels began to turn, the treads squealed, the flatbed flexed under the rolling weight, and the tank kicked forward with a cloud of smoke and metallic whines. Men stood back while the tank crept ahead toward the ramps, afraid the giant might stumble and fall on them. They stood admiring, heartened. Luis felt even better, because he’d brought the Tigers here to Russia, he had saved them from the partisans.

The Tiger crept down the ramps, screeching and belching, surrounded and welcomed. When it was flat on the ground, two pairs of mechanics hammered at the tracks on either side, to knock out one of the pins that held the transport track sections together. The mammoth stood fuming under their blows; the small sledgehammers insignificant against what this tank’s armor could withstand, the hammer strikes like petting strokes.

While the pins were hammered out, the crew assembled the Tiger’s wider battle tracks on the ground at a spot twenty feet in front of the tank. Each cast-steel link weighed seventy-five pounds; the assembled tread would weigh well over a ton. A dozen men wrestled each link from the flatcar and hefted it into place, then pounded its pin in to join it to the whole. Luis sat on a fuel barrel watching the mechanics; when their Tigers roll over a mine in combat, or lose a track to an enemy shell, these mechanics would have to effect this repair on the battlefield, under fire, or lose the Tiger. No one was better at this than the Germans, Europe’s greatest machinists.

Once the pins on the transport treads were beaten out, the tank rolled slowly forward, allowing the unhinged tread to spool out onto the ground. The tank rolled across the earth on its bare wheels for a few meters, then crept up onto the new combat tracks. Mechanics on both sides guided the tracks over the sprockets with come-along rods. When the new tracks were in place, they were joined with the pins bashed back into place. The transport tracks on the ground were hooked to a tractor and dragged off. The first of the new Tiger tanks stood ready, leaving behind an exhausted crew staring at nine more groaning flatcars.

Luis watched the off-loading of the second tank, wondering if the mechanics would be able to get them all on the ground and re-treaded by dark. The tanks had been his charges for several days, he’d risked his own neck to protect them, and he felt little pangs when they were started up, refitted, and driven off without him.

While the third Tiger was idling on its flatbed, another SS captain walked over from the train platform. He leaned against a steel pillar beside Luis’s perch. The man was impeccably outfitted, every buckle and strap gleamed. A cigarette was pasted on his lips, his pale blue eyes were hooded and sleepy. He folded his arms and crossed his boots, standing on one leg, spewing smoke, rakish.

‘What do you think?’ He spoke without taking the cigarette from his mouth.

Luis turned to the man, the only one to talk to him in the hours since the train pulled in. He was one of the German SS, wearing the lightning bolt runes at the collars. Between the collar tabs hung an Iron Cross First Class. This captain was close to Luis’s age, the blond, lithe Aryan of posters. Luis felt something pleasant he’d missed for most of a year: He was drawn to another human. This captain was disdainful, confident with a cool carriage, the manner Luis considered best for soldiers and bullfighters. The man cut the figure that Luis imagined he would have without his wound.

‘About what?’ Luis answered.

‘The Tigers. What do you think? Are they worth waiting for? We’ve been putting off the attack until they got here.’

Luis couldn’t tell how to respond. Was he being baited into saving something negative? He didn’t know this captain; what was the man’s interest in the Tigers? Or in Luis?

He watched the next tank amble onto the ramps. The thing was huge, its cannon so powerful, the chassis and turret girded with the thickest armor of any tank ever produced. It would be operated by SS-trained crews. What did the Russians have to counter the Tiger or the SS? Luis envisioned the fire belching from the big cannon, Russian tanks bursting before it, Russian villages burning, his own hand – the old hand, the fleshy one – on the trigger.

Luis had arrived with the Tigers, defended them on the rails, and they remained under his protection until they were off the train and driven away. He felt loyal to these tanks. He would not criticize them simply to curry favor. And he would not utter anything good about the Russians. Is that what this captain wanted him to do? Luis watched the man grip his cigarette between long, elegant fingers. He noted the band on the captain’s left cuff, the words Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler emblazoned in silver thread. He was still drawn to this captain but now he felt competitive. He was in Leibstandarte, too. He felt the life of the partisan throb again in his knife hand. What has this captain done? Has he done that?

‘Yes,’ Luis said, ‘yes, of course they’re worth waiting for. Look at them. They were designed to be better than any tank in the world. What other tank has an 88 for a main gun? The Russians have just got 76s. Pop guns. The Tiger can sit back at two thousand meters and pick them off. What have the Russians got to match that?’

The captain puffed, not looking at Luis but at the growling Tiger being shucked of its transport treads.

‘What the Russians do have is twenty-five T-34s manufactured for every one of these Tigers,’ he told Luis. ‘When the Kursk battle starts, we’ll have Mark IIIs, IVs, Mark V Panthers, Mark VI Tigers, all of them mixed together. How do we expect to keep spare parts available for so many models? Tracks, transmissions, engines, wheels. But the Reds, they were smart, you see. They put only one tank on the field. The fast little T-34. If something breaks, there’s plenty of parts laying around for it. And every one of their soldiers knows how to fix the damn thing, it’s as simple as a wind-up toy. The Russians make one tank and they produce thousands of them a month. But do you know it takes over three hundred thousand man hours to build one Tiger? Yes, the Reds. The Untermenschen. They are smart about this.’

The captain brandished his smoky fingers while extolling the intellect of the enemy. Luis frowned at the suggestion that the Russians had out-thought Hitler.

‘That’s crap. What does it matter, when none of them can stop a Tiger? I don’t care how many T-34s the Reds have got. Each Tiger is worth a hundred of them. The armor is so thick…’

‘One hundred twenty millimeters on the gun mantlet, one hundred millimeters on the hull front,’ the fetching young captain interrupted. ‘Eighty millimeters upper-hull sides and rear, sixty on the lower sides. Turret front has one hundred millimeters, turret sides and rear, eighty. Twenty-five millimeters all horizontal surfaces. Impervious to the Russian .76 gun at distances greater than four hundred meters. Impenetrable by Russian tanks at any distance head-on.’

Luis paused. This man knew the tanks’ specifications. Luis nodded at the captain, though the man’s blue eyes stayed fixed on his tanks. And they were his Tigers, Luis realized. He was the one who’d come to Belgorod station to claim them.

The captain stood away from the pillar. He dropped his cigarette and trod on it, walking toward the grounded tank and the hammering mechanics. He raised a hand to point out his observations, assuming without looking that Luis was behind him.

‘Look at the armor. See how it’s straight up and down, like a giant shoe box? Hitler told his designers he wanted nothing of Russian design, those Untermenschen and their tanks. So instead of sloping the armor, which would have added a great deal of protection, the Tiger is a collection of flat faces. If the plating had been sloped like the T-34, the Tiger could have been made twenty to thirty percent lighter. Lighter means faster. Better range and maneuverability. But this big bastard is too heavy for its engine. It’s ponderous even under the best conditions.’

The captain walked to the rear of the Tiger, inhaling its engine fumes like the scents of a woman. He knows these tanks, Luis thought. He’s fought in them, he’s lost them and seen them killed and is furious with their flaws because he loves them. He knows these tanks must save Germany. And look at him. He wants a few more medals for himself. So he knows, too, the Tigers have to do their job before the Americans intervene, or there’ll be nothing left to win in Russia but your own life.

The captain talked on, breezy.

‘Look at all this back here. Exhaust covers, air filters, it’s a trap for shot. And this eighty-eight millimeter gun you’re so in love with. That’s the reason why this damn tank is so gigantic, just to carry it. There’s a new, long-barreled seventy-five on the Panthers that will do the trick. But Hitler wanted the eighty-eights, and so here they are. Do you know what the mileage for a Tiger is?’

Luis shook his head. The captain was showing off.

‘Point eight miles per U.S. gallon on roads. Less than half a mile per gallon cross-country. With a one-hundred-and-forty-two-gallon fuel capacity, that’s four to five hours of battle running.’

‘That’s not good.’

‘No,’ the captain laughed, ‘it’s not good.’

The man reached out to the idling Tiger and smacked it hard.

‘But so far, it’s been good enough.’ He thrust the hand at Luis. ‘Captain Erich Thoma. 1st SS Panzergrenadier Division. Pleased to meet you, Captain la Daga. Major Grimm sends his regards.’

The captain’s clasp was warm and enveloping. With the mention of his nickname, the partisan’s life beat harder in his bony mitt, there inside the handshake between the two SS captains,

‘Captain Luis Ruiz de Vega.’

‘Si,’ Thoma said. ‘Gracias por truer mis Tigres.’ Thank you for bringing my Tigers.

‘You were in Spain?’

‘Yes,’ Thoma said. He cast his eyes over Belgorod’s fading skyline. ‘I wish we were there now. I much preferred fighting in Spain. Beautiful country.’

Thoma left the handshake and tapped Luis in the arm with the gibe. The gesture was manly, between warriors, with no concession or notice of Luis’s painful thinness. Thoma put his hand between Luis’s shoulder blades.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Major Grimm wants to see you.’

July 3 2115 hours Belgorod

Thoma and the rest of the cars ran without headlights to get to their posts before the steppe darkness grew total. Luis rode beside Thoma in the front seat of a Mercedes convertible staff car. Belgorod was a small German city at this point, almost no Russians were visible on the streets and sidewalks. Soldiers manned sandbagged positions at every corner. Not a single window let light seep into the gathering dusk, all were shaded by blackout curtains. Horse-drawn carts clip-clopped through the town headed north to the lines. There was something medieval about the sight of soldiers leading animals on tethers over cobblestones.

Thoma drove and talked about his tanks, acknowledging Luis’s background in them, updating him on changes in the armored divisions during the time he’d been in the hospital. The old Mark III light tanks were too small to be of much good anymore. The turret ring wouldn’t take any of the bigger guns. They were obsolete. Their production had been halted in June of this year. Even so, Germany still had over four hundred Mark IIIs around Kursk, in infantry-support roles. The 50 mm gun could still kill a T-34 at five hundred meters, but, Thoma opined, most Mark IIIs would be dead before they could get that close.

The workhorse of the Wehrmacht remained the Mark IV medium tank, with 850 of them around the Kursk salient. The design had been upgunned since Luis had commanded his Mark IV outside Leningrad. The tank now featured a long 75 mm cannon with a greater muzzle speed than the T-34. The Mark IV, in Thoma’s estimation, had superior cannon and fire controls, and a better three-man turret. The Soviets possessed superb mobility and armor, but held only a crew of four, putting a lot of pressure on the commander/gunner.

‘Both can wipe the other out at standard battle ranges. There’s no real technical advantage between the T-34 and the Mark IV. So the dead and the living, you see, Captain la Daga, will be determined by tactics and training.’

The Tigers, Thoma declared, were not designed to be offensive weapons. They were too slow for that, they had eight forward gears and four reverse, with an average overland speed of thirteen miles per hour. The range of the Tiger’s main gun was too long to be used solely in tight fighting, where the advantages of distance were dismissed. No, the heavy Tigers were most lethal when used in defense. But Kursk was not to be a defensive battle. The tank that was ordained to become Germany’s standard offensive weapon was the new Mark V Panther. Luis had never seen one of the Panthers, though he’d heard much about them. Sloped armor, medium weight, a long-barreled 75 mm main gun that could penetrate any Soviet armor, as nimble as the T-34s, the Panther was reputed to be the master of the Russian tank in every category.

‘But,’ Thoma said, wagging his long fingers again, ‘the Panther’s going through some teething pains. The transmissions and engines don’t seem ready, the things blow up on their own. Hitler hurried them into production to get them ready for their debut here. Two hundred were delivered to 4th Panzer Army but we don’t have any of them in the SS Panzer Corps. They’re on our left flank with the 10th Panzer Brigade. To tell you the truth, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the Panthers in Kursk as anything more than smoke bombs.’

‘That leaves your Tigers,’ Luis said.

‘Yes. That does, doesn’t it?’ Thoma smiled. ‘Poor out-of-place monsters. They’ll just have to make do.’

The car pulled up in front of a four-story brick building rising beneath a tarnished gilt dome. Thoma and Luis slammed their car doors to the convertible, they were two young men with long strides in black uniforms, gliding alongside each other up the steps. Inside, they dodged men with sheaves of paper in the hall, other young, shining soldiers in the service of the generals directing the coming battle from these rooms. The eyes of those men hurrying by sometimes snagged on Luis, so odd-looking was he beside the hale Thoma, and he began his accustomed descent into contempt for those without scars. Thoma saw this – how could Luis hide it? – and slipped his arm under Luis’s elbow.

‘They wouldn’t know which end of a gun to fire,’ the captain said without lowering his voice.

Thoma laughed, he and his Iron Cross, and Luis felt his own discomfort ease. Thoma ushered him into a high-ceilinged room off the main corridor. Under an impressive muraled ceiling lay a vast map of the Kursk region, resting on the tops of a half-dozen tables shoved together. Positioned all over the map were painted wooden effigies, like game pieces on a wonderfully large board. There were carved tanks and artillery guns, squares and circles with flags standing over them denoting armed units, colored black or red, German or Russian. Two young orderlies waited along the rim of the table with long poles to push the pieces about; it was shuffleboard with machines and lives as pucks.

Thoma led Luis to the edge of the carpet and halted, heels together. Luis copied this posture of attention, making his boots click. On the far side of the room stood Major Grimm speaking with an SS colonel. The fat major looked better now in a fresh shirt, he’d had a bath and a shave.

‘Captain Thoma. Good, good! Come in.’

The two young captains advanced around the long perimeter of the table. Walking beside the map, Luis glanced down to it. The map held far more red figurines than black.

‘Colonel,’ Major Grimm said, ‘this is the young man I told you about. Captain de Vega, this is Colonel Breit. He’s the intelligence officer with your Leibstandarte Division.’

To Luis’s eye, Colonel Breit was the epitome of a general staff officer. The man was slender, with a close-cropped head of dark hair, flecked with white. The colonel was pale and seemed uncomfortable with speech, the opposite of the energetic and verbose Thoma. Breit wore a War Merit Cross with swords on his breast. This was not a battle citation but the sort of medal won by administrators, for non-combat contributions to the war effort. The only tank this one has ever handled, Luis considered, is on these maps. Breit welcomed Luis with a handshake and a curt, tight-lipped smile. Nothing on the man’s face betrayed any thought about Luis’s appearance. He’s the brainy sort, Luis decided. He doesn’t care about anything that’s not on these tables.

‘Captain de Vega,’ Breit said. His tone was clipped. ‘Thank you for coming. Major Grimm has been telling me you’re an impressive young man.’

Major Grimm piped up. ‘You should have seen him, Colonel. His planning was impeccable.’

Grimm said nothing more. There was no mention of the killings by the rail mound. Luis supposed they had been covered earlier by the major. But Breit held on to Luis’s hand for a longer moment, nodding into Luis’s eyes, seeing something there he approved of. There was much unspoken about this SS colonel.

Breit let go of Luis’s hand.

‘Captain, let me bring you up-to-date on the situation around Kursk.’

The staff officer turned to indicate the giant map and all its pieces. Thoma came to stand beside Luis, Major Grimm sidled around to the Soviet side of the chart.

‘As you know,’ Breit said, ‘Germany has spent two summers now in the Soviet Union. We have not succeeded in destroying the Red armies as we’d planned. In fact, now in our third summer here, it has become unlikely we will do better than a stalemate on the Eastern Front.’

Luis stiffened at this candidness, smacking of defeatism. Breit cocked his head and smiled in his taut way again.

‘Captain de Vega, don’t be shocked. You’ve been away from the war for a year now, recuperating. The situation here in Russia is common knowledge, at least among the general staff. We keep up appearances among the men, of course, but we are officers here. You understand?’

This was the first time Luis had heard this view expressed as an official stance. He knew the coming entry of the Americans into the war made it urgent that Germany win in Russia this summer, at this battle. But now, to hear there was no victory to be had at all in Russia, simply a stalemate? What would happen after the Americans landed in Europe to his chances of returning home a conqueror? What will they say on the Ramblas in Barcelona to a tie? A million dead and ruined, for this? The notion lay rancid on his tongue. The bull must always die. When is it allowed to call a draw?

Thoma laid a hand on Luis’s shoulder. The touch said, Don’t worry, brother. These are not fighters like you and I. We will be the ones to decide, not them.

Luis swallowed. He indicated the map and Colonel Breit.

‘I apologize, sir. Please continue.’

The colonel resumed. ‘The question has been, what strategy will achieve for Germany the best political solution of the war? Our defeat at Stalingrad last winter cost us more than just men and weapons. Germany lost the initiative. Some of our allies have been looking for the back door out of their support for us. Romania and Italy have both contacted the Allies with peace feelers. Turkey is sitting on its hands and has decided not to attack the Soviet Union in the Caucasus, though they had agreed to do so. Japan is up to its neck with the Americans in the Pacific and is therefore upholding its non-aggression pact with Russia. And Finland has made entreaties to Stalin for a separate peace. Under these circumstances, Captain de Vega, you can see why Germany cannot sit back this summer. For both military and political reasons, we need an offensive on the Eastern Front to reclaim our momentum.’

Luis asked, ‘Sir, tell me about the Americans in Europe.’

‘Italy,’ Breit answered, shaking his head. ‘The Americans will invade Italy, most likely Sicily, and they’ll do it soon. This summer, certainly. When they do, the only place the Führer will be able to find troops to fend them off is here, the Eastern Front.’ Breit pointed down to the map, speaking to the German black blocks now, as though urging them. ‘If we haven’t broken through to Kursk before the Americans land in Europe, Hitler will almost certainly call off the attack. He will bleed off units from Citadel and send them to Italy. To Mussolini.’

Breit left his finger dangling above the map, contemplating the impact of such a thing.

‘Then,’ he said, lowering his voice and his hand as though lowering a flag, ‘I can make no predictions for Germany’s future.’

The colonel dug into his jacket for a cigarette. Major Grimm took over now. He raised one arm, a counterpoint to Breit’s deflated half-mast, and moved his flattened hand over the map’s terrain like a scudding cloud.

‘But we are going to attack, gentlemen. It will be fast and it will be magnificent, with more force than Germany has ever assembled. And the Americans can go hang. Right?’

Colonel Breit’s quiet face flared behind a flickering match. Thoma filled the void, responding with ‘Right.’ Luis said nothing and Thoma raised his eyebrows at him. Grimm said, ‘Take a look here, at the front line, stretching from Leningrad to Rostov. It doesn’t take much to see the best place for us to strike.’ He turned his flat hand into a pointing finger, as if the cloud had released one large drop of rain.

‘Here,’ he said, looking up at Luis. ‘Our target is Kursk. Operation Citadel.’

Luis brought his gaze down to the map and saw how right Grimm was, how easily the decision must have been made. The Soviet lines projected into German-held territory as though kicked into them by a mule. On the northern border of the bulge sat the city of Orel, in the south lay Belgorod. A straight axis drawn between the two cities met in the middle of the bulge, at Kursk.

‘We’ll attack from the north out of Orel,’ Grimm said, ‘and out of the south from the area west of Belgorod. If we can meet at Kursk, we’ll have wiped out two Soviet front armies.

After a successful pincer action on Kursk, we’ll be able to straighten our lines, shortening them by a hundred and fifty miles. These are men and materiel we will need elsewhere. As Colonel Breit mentioned, the Americans are expected to land soon in Italy. Once we have Kursk, we can send our forces south to fight off the Allies for Mussolini.’

Colonel Breit sucked loudly on his cigarette. Grimm stepped back and Breit trod up to the map.

‘At first, it was discussed that our forces should wait on a Russian summer offensive. We would grind them down and then go on the offensive ourselves. Take them ‘on the backhand,’ Field Marshal von Manstein has called it. But it’s been decided by Hitler that we will be the ones to go on the attack. The ‘forehand,’ so to speak. And so…’ Breit swept his own hand over the map, ‘…here we are. Looking at the same chart the Russians are looking at. They know exactly what we intend, and where. History, it seems, will have it no other way’

The four officers stood around the huge map, sombered by the notion that they stood at a pivot point in world events. Luis looked to Thoma. The young officer seemed to be calculating the coming clash, his eyes shrewdly tagging the positions and strengths displayed in red and black blocks. He did not appear to Luis to be daunted, though some of the devil-may-care and dash in the set of his spine was gone.

Thoma spoke to Breit. ‘Colonel, may I?’

The officer nodded.

Thoma turned to one of the orderlies. He took from the boy the long stick. The tank captain addressed Luis.

‘The Reds have about one and a half million men inside the salient.’

He reached out the stick and tapped several red bits and flags inside the bulge, bearing the names Voronezh Front, Central Front, and Steppe Front.

‘We’ve got eight hundred thousand men. That’s a two-to-one advantage for the Russians.’

Thoma took in all the German positions with a wave of the stick like a wand. The ebony blocks were spread north, middle, and south, while the crimson ones concentrated in the middle. The blocks were clotted in each color, crowding each other for space on the map.

‘We’ve got ten thousand artillery pieces,’ Thoma said. ‘The Reds have twenty thousand. Two-to-one again. Facing our twenty-five hundred tanks and self-propelled assault guns, the Russians have five thousand.’ He lowered the stick and grinned at Luis. ‘I believe the math speaks for itself.’

Major Grimm began the long walk back around the table. ‘So you see, Captain de Vega, those ten Tigers you delivered to us are crucial. There are only a hundred and thirty-three of them out of all our tanks in Russia.’

Colonel Breit stepped to Luis, laying a hand to his arm.

‘You did a great service seeing those Tigers through. We don’t have a numerical advantage against the Russians. The Führer is counting on these tanks to even the score. Yours was the final shipment of Tigers. Captain Thoma?’

‘Yes, mein Herr?’

‘Captain Thoma here commands one of Leibstandarte’s armored companies.’ Colonel Breit kept his hand and eyes on Luis. ‘Out of the forty-two Tigers in the SS Corps, we have fourteen in our division. Sixty-two Mark IIIs. Thirty-three Mark IVs. And… how many T-34s, Captain?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Twenty-five Russian tanks we will turn against their former owners. So. There we are. Captain Thoma here will find you suitable quarters. I am assigning you to my staff, Captain de Vega. I assume you have no pressing orders requiring your return to Germany?’

‘No, Colonel.’

‘Good. From what Major Grimm tells me, I can use a steadfast manner like yours around this table. Settle in and report to me here at oh-five-hundred.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Colonel Breit nodded to Thoma and left the room. Major Grimm gave both young captains an approving nod and followed in the colonel’s wake. The two orderlies went behind them. Thoma hung on to the long stick.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘good for you.’

Luis was conflicted about the assignment to Colonel Breit’s tactical staff. How much of the battle would be fought in this room? Real lives won’t be taken, real ground won’t be gained on this colossal paper plate. Standing here during the battle he might win for himself one of the merit badges worn by officers like Breit. But what he craved was the Iron Cross worn by Erich Thoma.

‘Tell me something,’ Thoma asked him. ‘How did you get to be called la Daga? As soon as Major Grimm told me I said: Now that’s a wonderful nickname. Tell me the truth. Was it some bullfighting thing you did?’

Luis folded his arms, reluctant, but Thoma’s grin fanned a spark inside him. He had not had a friend in almost a year. He’d been an invalid, a recovering patient, surrounded by nurses and doctors who’d marveled at his willpower to heal and return to the war, but no one had dared enter the bulging eyes and white, straining frame to see if the heart and soul of the Spanish soldier had shrunk, too. They had not. Thoma stood now cajoling Luis, wanting a secret, something from beneath the flesh to share, something only for the two of them to know.

There was not much room anymore in Luis, he admitted this. He looked at smiling Erich Thoma and found there was enough for a friend.

‘No. It wasn’t from bullfighting.’

Thoma grinned. ‘And?’

‘In Barcelona, there’s a long boulevard through the old quarter down to the water, La Rambla. Gypsies used to walk along the stalls and mix in with the tourists. They taught me how to come up behind tourists and slit their pants pockets with a razor.’

‘Why?’ Thoma’s face was incredulous.

‘To get their wallets.’

‘Gott im Himmel,’ Thoma cried. ‘You’re a pickpocket!’

‘Shhhhh.’ Luis waved his hands at the laughing captain. Thoma pretended to compose himself, then burst out guffawing again.

‘That’s better than any bullfighting story! That’s beautiful. You stole wallets!’

‘Alright,’ Luis said. Alright. Get it out of your system.’ He looked about to see if anyone else could hear this outburst from Thoma, but they were alone. Luis admired the wellspring from which Thoma laughed, it all seemed so rooted in him, so confident and authentic; at the same time, Luis was sorrowed by the knowledge that he no longer had such depths himself. Erich Thoma was the man Luis would have been.

‘Now it’s your turn. Tell me something. The truth, as well.’

Thoma cleared his throat and smoothed down his hair, worn longish for a combat officer. His face crinkled.

‘Citadel.’ Luis gestured at the campaign map. ‘I want to know about the battle.’

Thoma stepped to the map, lowering the long stick like a lance.

‘One thing’s for certain. It’s going to be one for the record books.’ He hovered the stick over the map. All the great generals are here.’ He tapped the stick to a set of black blocks on the northern shoulder of the bulge. ‘In the north, running the show, we’ve got Field Marshal von Kluge. He’s not so sure about the operation and has said so. Hitler, I think, has more confidence in General Model.’ He laid the stick to a collection of blocks in the north bearing the 11th Army signet, Model’s force.

‘Problem with Model is, he’s the one who’s been dragging his feet, making us all wait with his demands for more and more armor when we should have jumped off months ago. It’s July now, and he’s got his tanks and guns, but in the meanwhile the Reds have used the time to dig in like ticks.’

Luis took in the thickness of the red blocks. The analogy was apt, the map seemed bitten and swollen ruby by them.

Thoma swept the stick over the southern shoulder of the bulge.

‘In the south we’ve got our genius Field Marshal von Manstein. For the most part Citadel is his brainchild. And the best fighter in the bunch is down here, too, with 4th Panzer. Papa Hoth. Next to us here… on the SS right flank is Army Detachment Kempf. It’s an ad hoc collection, really, strong enough on paper but Werner Kempf has never commanded this many men before. He’s got to keep up on our right.’

‘How about the Russians?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Thoma chuckled, touching the stick to the hillocks of clustered red blocks inside the bulge, north, middle, and south. ‘They’ve brought out their top guns for this one, too. Central Front is under Rokossovsky. Voronezh Front under Vatutin. In reserve at Steppe Front, Koniev. And over all of them is Georgi Zhukov, who kicked our asses in Moscow and Stalingrad. I can’t wait to meet Georgi.’

‘Thoma.’

‘Yes, de Vega.’

This was the first time either man had not called the other ‘Captain.’

‘What do you think? Personally?’

‘Me? I’m just a soldier, I don’t have my own block. But I’ll tell you this. The Reds have got more of everything, men, guns, tanks, planes, we’ve hemmed and hawed long enough to give them all the time they needed to get ready for us. There’s aerial photography for every foot of the salient, but it’s been hard to estimate the Reds’ strength. They’re so damn good at disguising their forces and using fake positions. Even so, hanging over all this is one big fact that every one of these blocks is aware of, red or black. Up until now, in every German offensive, the Soviets outnumbered us then, too. But you know what? Not once have they stopped a German advance before we got far behind their lines. We’ll go deep on this one, too, you can count on it. The question is, will we get to Kursk? And will we get there before the Americans hit shore in Italy and Hitler pulls the plug on Citadel?’

‘Where are you?’ Luis asked. ‘Where’s Leibstandarte?’

‘In the heart of II SS Panzer Corps.’ Thoma dabbed the stick in the center of the southern lines. ‘Right here, to the left of Das Reich and Totenkopf. We’re going to be in the vanguard. Leibstandarte will make straight north. Right along here. Citadel jumps off in two days.’

Luis leaned forward to read the map under the point of Thoma’s stick. Red blocks crowded along the path.

‘The Oboyan road.’

Thoma laid the stick to the Russian positions. ‘Right across from us is 6th Guards Army. They were at Stalingrad, so they’re battle-tough. Behind them, in front of Oboyan, is 1st Tank Army. Vatutin, here on the Voronezh Front, has put his best forces along that road, figuring Papa Hoth was going to dive straight for Kursk through Oboyan. Instead, 4th Panzer is going this way, northwest to Prokhorovka, around their best force. We’ll take on this group here, 5th Guards Tank Army, kept in reserve. We’ll deal with them, then swerve back west toward Oboyan and Kursk. As long as Kempf keeps up and protects our right flank, we should be alright.’

Luis was galvanized by the map. It was almost impossible for him to translate his combat experiences to it, to reduce the memories to such a tiny scale. But there it was. Head this way. Deal with this force. Turn and go that way. Where was the carnage? Where was the wound in his gut, where was it on the map?

‘Come on.’ Thoma clapped a hand over Luis’s shoulder. ‘We need to find you someplace to sleep. You look like hell.’

Luis did not take exception to the comment. It was not meant the way it came out.

He decided to smile at Captain Thoma.

He said, ‘I know.’

July 3 2320 hours Belgorod

Thoma heard the bombers first. He raised one hand, cigarette poised between fingertips, and listened. Then Luis heard them, thrumming from the north. It was easy to imagine an Asiatic horde in the sky, riding down on them, the engines sounded like hoofbeats, the ground shook under the thunder.

Thoma threw away his smoke. It landed at the bottom of the steps of the storefront where Luis was billeted.

‘Good luck to you, la Daga. I’ve got to go.’

‘Take me with you. I want to see the division.’

‘Can’t. This might be the opening bell, and you need to be here in the morning. I might not be able to get you back. We’ve both got our orders.’

‘Thoma.’

‘Yes?’

‘Look… Thanks.’

The captain smiled and was at that moment a heartache for Luis. He suffered under Thoma’s round and full face, the strength in his handshake; the bit of battle was between Thoma’s teeth, and Luis was to be left behind beside a map, a stick in his hand.

‘Go.’

Thoma nodded and gripped once more hard, then let go Luis’s hand. He turned and leaped into the convertible’s front seat without opening the car door.

‘Thoma?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m going to push the Leibstandarte blocks all the way to Kursk.’

‘Maybe you’ll do a lot more than that, la Daga! See you!’

Thoma wheeled away at the flashing western sky with his headlamps off. The roar of the motorcar disappeared into the pounding of bombs and high-flung engines. The Reds were targeting the German front lines, trying to soften up the Panzer Corps arrayed in a seventy-mile row across from them. The Russians must know the attack is coming soon.

In two days, Thoma said.

Luis stood on the sidewalk beside the abandoned cigarette. He looked around the darkened city of Belgorod, without lights or people, then pivoted a circle on his boot heels. Buildings lifted like an arena on all sides, but empty, without audience for him. When he came around to the west, the horizon above the roofs flickered orange, body blows to the three SS divisions in a row there, where Thoma sped and Luis belonged. With each fiery glimmer, Luis remembered his hatred better; he grew angry at Erich Thoma for making him forget, even for a few hours, what he was.

Luis watched the bombs falling somewhere else and retreated inside himself, into his wretched, ugly body. He did not have far to go.

July 4 0500 hours SS Leibstandarte situation room Belgorod

At dawn, Colonel Breit greeted Luis over the map. The colonel mentioned that this morning marked Independence Day in America.

‘I understand,’ the colonel said, ‘they celebrate with fireworks. An appropriate metaphor for our own endeavors, eh, Captain?’

This proved to be the extent of Colonel Brett’s attempts at conversation. That was just as well for Luis, who’d awakened from his hard cot beneath a deserted millinery shop in a simmering mood. Breit set about his work at keeping the gargantuan map updated and fed, the thing changed and shifted like something hungry and restless. In the apartments and corridors of the building, radio operators and couriers collected the latest words from the front lines and ferried them to the map room. No grand strategies would be crafted here in Belgorod. The city was too close to the front; the German generals of Army Group South made their decisions at an airfield twenty miles south, in Prud’anka, where they could fly in and out and confer. Colonel Breit’s orders were to follow battlefield developments, study the configurations on the map, then wire the information to the command center at Prud’anka. He fretted over his paper landscape and lorded over those lesser deities than him in charge of helping him keep the map thriving.

The windows to the situation room remained opaque behind blackout curtains, and the morning grew stifling. The rains of the day before left a sultry residue in the air. Weather reports came in, Luis wrote their contents on a chalkboard: low cloud cover, threatening thunderstorms across the area, hot and steamy along the ground. Major Grimm entered the situation room soon after sunup and began his sweating, mopping ordeal. Colonel Breit would not let the major lean over the map for fear he would dribble on it. Colonel Breit did not comment but Luis was aware the officer took note of him standing bolt upright in his buttoned jacket beside the table, seemingly untouched by the rising heat and tension of the room.

Every communiqué transmitted to the building was to come through Luis. He arranged the reports for urgency, compared and vetted them for accuracy, then handed the reliable accounts to Colonel Breit, who translated the sheets into movements on the board. Their main task was to keep track of the three SS divisions in the middle of Army Group South and the opposing forces, the Soviets’ Voronezh Front. Major Grimm shuttled in and out of the map room, Luis heard him on the radio with his superiors advising them of SS actions. Luis had never observed the eve of battle like this, from the lofty perspective of a god. Here, detached voices whispered the intents and fates of two million soldiers. Each of the black blocks was five thousand or more men, clustering right now under ground sheets out in the drizzle, perspiring from heat and nerves, not a one of them with the vantage point of Luis, who looked down on the sheer weight of the red blocks across from their force, the Reds packed in, waiting, ready. This was the battle that history books would tell, the scope of this map would be recreated, embracing hundreds of miles of conflict and never the bloody personal skirmishes and the screaming seconds where one man killed an enemy or was killed. Luis knew he was not a coward, far from it, though he suspected the others dashing in and out of the room and those caressing the map were. He’d been a warrior not long ago but right now he was one of them, the message takers. The clean battle of wooden blocks was appealing, and Luis felt the tug of fighting this way, like gamesmen. But the map room was not the arena and bulls are not cut of wood.

The dawn warmed to morning, and the messages from the southern lines began to flurry in from 4th Panzer. Companies of sappers had spent the night removing mines in front of their positions; for six hours several hundred engineers dug up almost a mine a minute. Luis and Breit plotted the cleared areas. Major Grimm said something was up. The attack, Operation Citadel, was not supposed to start until 0300 hours tomorrow morning.

At noon, Luis began to receive messages from General Hoth’s headquarters. Papa Hoth had made the decision to move up into the no-man’s-land between his forces and the Reds’, to improve his position for the jump-off in the coming morning hours. They needed to eliminate enemy forward strongpoints and observation posts, and find the exact location of the Soviets’ first line of defenses. The black blocks of 4th Panzer began to tighten. At 1445 hours, couriers from the bowels of the building ferried in a burst of messages: An air raid had begun over the Russians around Butovo, near the center of Hoth’s line. The first thrust of Citadel had begun. One of the quiet stick-handlers around the table laid a small carved airplane over the Russian town.

Another ten minutes passed. Luis handled another page: An artillery barrage followed the planes, conventional artillery was joined by Nebelwerfer rocket batteries to pummel and unnerve the Soviet advance positions. Then the middle of Hoth’s line rushed forward at the Russian strongpoints of Gertsovka, Butovo, and Streletskoye. Luis watched one of the stick-boys shove the black blocks to the north.

When the attack was less than fifteen minutes old, the sky opened with a blinding rainstorm. The map room shuddered under the thunderclaps, barely muffled by the heavy curtains and thick brick walls. The messages kept up a steady stream into Luis’s hands and the pieces on the board made their way north, into the Russian defenses, slogging over the dry map. Luis knew the sounds of combat, he knew the suck and slip of mud under boots and wheels and treads. The whiz of a bullet is different when it slices through rain to get to you, you hear it coming sooner and you hear it pass longer. None of these were on the map with its charging black bits and the reeling red pieces, nor were they on the faces of Breit or Grimm or the stick-boys or messengers quick-stepping in with the news. The sounds were only in Luis’s ears. He imagined himself standing in the turret of Erich Thoma’s Tiger, leading the assault, and it was bitter for him waiting for the blocks labeled Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler to move ahead. So far the three SS divisions had stayed out of the initial stages of the fray.

The afternoon hours passed, too, this way, quieter once the thunder rolled off, leaving the shuffle of feet and pages, the dry slide of wood pieces over paper. The attack was taking place fifteen miles west of Belgorod, stretching another ten miles to the west. Luis followed events with a tension in his chest he fought to hide. German forces struck the defenders between Berezov and Streletskoye, surrounding a Soviet battalion and driving off the rest. A fierce fight took place for control of Gertsovka. A German battalion commander was badly wounded and one-third of his men were hit, including the commander’s replacement. At 2100 hours Gertsovka was cleared but at a high price for both armies. Butovo to the east was taken, the Soviet garrison was driven off, but not before Russian riflemen put up a seven-hour brawl that left all of their number dead. Their epitaph was a black block pushed into Butovo over their bodies.

The three blocks of the SS Panzer Divisions did not move throughout the day, while the rest of the German lines improved their positions. Luis wanted to ask Colonel Breit if he might go out to observe firsthand the situation, but instead bit his tongue and dealt with his task. Sometimes you have to go to the bull, but often enough it comes to you.

After midnight, at on 5 hours on the morning of July 5, Luis handed a message to Colonel Breit detailing the entry into battle of the three SS Panzer Divisions. Within the next hour, these divisions destroyed half the forward outposts of the Russian 6th Guards Army and forced many others to withdraw. Luis himself slid the tank icon of his Leibstandarte comrades into the Red lines.

Luis was exhausted, he’d been at his station for twenty-three hours. Colonel Breit slipped out of the situation room, Major Grimm was long gone. Luis was left in charge. He told the stick-boys he would be back in a minute.

Outside, rain pelted the street, peals of thunder pounced. Operation Citadel had begun in this, glimpses of the enemy came in split-second flashes from lightning, the explosions of shells were lost in Nature’s din. The world had been torn open here around Kursk. Luis said a prayer aloud in Spanish. This was his father’s practice before the bulls and in the last five years Luis had made it his own custom against men. He asked for victory. His words trudged out into the downpour like soldiers.