Last Citadel

July 5 0330 hours Vladimirovka

Dimitri tugged the tarp tighter under his chin. He’d made a makeshift hood and poncho out of the oiled sheet and let the rain tumble over him. The heavy drops pattered over his covered shoulders and crown. Even with the chattering of the rain in his ears he could hear the explosions.

The German and Red armies traded blows in this hour before dawn, preparation and counter-preparation. A thousand artillery pieces on both sides lofted shells, one at the other, like arguing spouses, while the earth, a sick and sad child between them, shivered under Dimitri’s boots. He leaned against his tank, alone it seemed, under the rain, watching and listening to the beginnings of the battle. His son and crew were in their covered foxhole riding out the storm. The rest of the tankers in the brigade were buttoned up out of the rain, too, inside their two dozen tanks or holes. Dimitri was glad to be alone with the thunders of God and man for these final minutes before the war came back to him. He said a few prayers for himself and his children. He didn’t know where Katya was. He could help God protect Valentin, but the daughter was off on her own, up in the sky doing who knew what. Dimitri had never been in a plane, the highest his feet had ever risen from the ground was sitting on a seventeen-hand horse. He didn’t know what to pray for her protection, he had only poor images of her dangers. He prayed for Katya that she remember she was a Cossack, and figured that was protection enough.

Lightning coursed overhead. He lifted his eyes to it and caught rain on his face. In the next minutes the rain eased to a drizzle. He walked to the hole where his crew slept and peeled back their tarpaulin.

‘It’s started,’ he said.

The three had been lying on their sides curled in the dirt like piglets. Pasha and Sasha had slept well, they yawned and slowly roused. Valentin was first to his feet. His eyes were rimmed, his mouth downturned.

‘Orders?’ he asked Dimitri.

‘Not yet. They’re coming, you can bet.’

Pasha and Sasha came up, the four of them in a row in their gray tanker’s coveralls. They faced south, checking the dripping sky. Then Dimitri heard not the boom of artillery but droning engines, higher than where the thunder had been. Soviet and German bombers and fighters were stepping into the fight, each side trying to pummel the other through the air before the clash of men on the ground. The four crewmen of General Platov leaned against their tank and gazed upward.

For thirty minutes a terrific dogfight took place over their heads. Even from three miles up, behind the thunder and lightning, the roars of German Me-109s streaked in twisted combat with Soviet bombers and Yak fighters. The Red Air Force and the Luftwaffe were testing each other the way the artillery did with their opening salvos. He felt the hard tank at his seat, the shoulders of boys pressing against him on both sides, and he knew they were next.

A blazing plane plummeted out of the clouds, trailing flame like a comet, lighting up the mist; burning pieces of it broke off and fluttered beside it until it all rammed into the ground. The plane was too far off and too engulfed by flame to tell if it was German or Russian. But the looks on the faces of Pasha and Sasha revealed this was the first war death they had ever seen. Dimitri stared at the fire in the cratered plain, and said one more quiet prayer for his daughter.

The rain stopped before the breakfast wagon creaked past at 0430. The men were given all the portions they wanted of warm porridge and powdered eggs. Sasha and Pasha ate with appetite, Dimitri and Valentin picked at their plates and did not talk. He watched his son and thought how little there was left this morning – the morn of the battle – of their blood relation. They’d sagged into becoming more private-sergeant than father-son. That is wrong, Dimitri thought. Again he did not know what to say or do, and the closer the war came, the more urgent and less capable he felt. He clamped his lips around his fork and pulled his eyes from Valya. Sasha and Pasha were dim boys, Dimitri knew how to negotiate them. But Valya, so intelligent and moody, he was a complexity beyond Dimitri’s ken, like a woman with his hurt feelings all the time. Always there was something beneath the surface brooding or baking. Christ! Dimitri thought, let it go, boy! Look at the battle flashes coming closer, look at that poor cooked bastard in his crashed plane out there flickering on the steppe, tick tick tick, it goes so fast, Valya, slow down, lick some honey, laugh, and shed tears. Dimitri shoveled his eggs into his mouth but spit the last bites out. He grew edgy. He wanted the fight for the Oboyan road to be here now. Something he could get his hands on, like a plow or a sword, two leather reins, the steering levers of his tank. Something he could handle. Valentin, he could not.

He smacked Pasha in his meaty shoulder.

‘Come on, big one,’ he said, ‘let’s take one more look at the shell bins and be sure where everything is. Sasha, you oil your machine-gun, count your ammo belts. Up, lads.’

Dimitri slid into his hatch and started his engine. The General awoke for him.

The morning passed this way, scrambling over their machinery, going over drills and tactics. Valentin joined them after a while, climbing into his seat and barking orders to Pasha, the boy on his knees on the rubber matting. Valentin spun his turret, checked his optics, tested the intercom, arranged his maps. The crew of four filled the tank with flurrying activity, the crackle of voices in earphones, and pretend enemies. Dimitri nodded at the progress of the two new boys. Valentin handled them with precision. All was ready.

At 1015 hours, word came down the echelon of tanks. The Germans had indeed burst out of their positions north and south. The push for Kursk was on. The initial reports here on the Voronezh Front were that the German 4th Panzer Army had a head of steam into the advance trenches of the first defense belt, manned by 6th Army. Third Mechanized Corps, with its ten thousand men, two hundred T-34s, and fifty self-propelled guns, was ordered to rush south to their prepared positions outside Syrtsev, stretching west for eight miles through the village of Luchanino to Alekseyevka on the Pena riverbank. The Germans would likely punch through 6th Army’s forward positions and reach the river by tomorrow morning. They’d be bloodied and angry by then. Dimitri and the other tanks of his division were assigned to bleed them some more at the second defense line.

The Corps’ commanding officer, Major General Krovoshein, issued a terse statement to his fighters, flyers were handed out down the line by runners. The simple sheet read: The road to Oboyan must be defended. The Germans are coming with everything they have. The battle for Kursk is the Nazis’ last hurrah. See to it they break their damn necks.

Dimitri slipped through his hatch and settled into his driver’s seat. Red-faced Sasha nestled next to him behind the machine-gun. Pasha sat above, to the right of Valentin’s place in the cramped turret. Valya stood with his head out in the air behind his raised hatch cover. The General idled, a glint of sun diced between parting clouds and fell through Dimitri’s open hatch. The T-34 line to his left rolled in front of him. Dimitri did not wait for Valya’s order to move out. He loosed his new tank, willing it silently to do well, to honor the name it bore, it had brave ancestors. Metal and men all across Dimitri’s narrow horizon lurched forward into breaking daylight and clumping mud.

July 6 0240 hours Syrtsev

Only the dead slept this night.

There was nowhere to drive. The General sat hull down in a defensive trench with only the turret showing, and Dimitri’s nerves keened. The tank’s nose was buried; in front of his driver’s hatch loomed the dirt wall of the berm, obscuring his small slitted aperture. Drifting in from Valentin’s raised hatch, falling down the boy’s shoulders like dust, came a darkness ruptured with the roar of artillery and falling bombs. This was all the light to reach Dimitri beyond his own green glowing dials. The interior of the tank jittered with flashes that were no longer far on the horizon but dead in front of them. Dimitri’s ears and the quaking of the seat under him told him the bursts were on all sides in the earth.

Valentin and Pasha worked the big gun, taking part in the barrage, the punch and counter-punch exchanges with the Germans only a few miles away. Dimitri glanced over at Sasha, also with nothing to do but wait and put up with explosions. The young gunner smiled at him, to show he was brave. Dimitri was in no mood for dull gallantry; he despised sitting still, waiting for a lucky German artillery round or night bomber to slap them on the back in this hole. The air in the tank was rank with propellant fumes, the night was warm and the dank ground sweated out the rains of the past two days. This was not how a man fights, he thought, hiding in a duck blind, trading shots like poltroons cowering behind cover.

The Germans had breached the first defense lines of 6th Guards. Tonight the enemy caught their breath south of the second defense belt, lofting shells to keep the Red forces across from them pinned down in their positions while sappers cleared lanes through the minefields. Valentin and the rest of their 3rd Mechanized Brigade fired at muzzle flashes, to keep heads down on the other side, too.

Several cramped hours passed and Dimitri chafed in his seat.

When enough racket and rattling time had passed, just minutes before Dimitri could boil over and jump out of the tight tank just to breathe some clean air, Valentin’s voice ordered him and Sasha to help replenish the General’s ammunition from the bunkered ammo they’d buried a week ago near their position. Dimitri thanked God and rose in his open hatch to hoist himself out.

Dawn had come. Beside the tank, Dimitri gazed over the disrupted, smoking plain. The day would be dry judging from the dawn sky, the earth slippery. In a wide band behind him among the splotches of craters were the dug-in positions of the 90th Guards Rifles. Arrayed left and right was his own brigade, and stretching beyond them to the Pena River the rest of his mechanized corps. Spikes of gun barrels large and small bristled in every place his eyes lit, out of foxholes and tank holes and artillery bunkers. He turned his eyes south, down from the high ground where he and his brigade were dug in, and there they were, black barbed dots two miles off, the Germans with the same needles poking out of the earth, aimed at him. In the past forty-eight hours, the Germans had already fought their way ten miles north from their jump-off lines. This morning they had one prize in mind: the Oboyan road, the artery to Kursk and the latchkey to German victory. Now they sat behind a river two miles south, meaning to come get their road. Dimitri stood in the way.

The lull in the firing lasted the remainder of the morning. Valentin pitched in and the General was soon reloaded. Dimitri was done with chatter among the two new boys – they had their jobs and their destinies and he had his. Valentin was quiet as usual. Bordering the few miles between their second defense line and the Germans was the once-narrow Luchanino River; this was normally a summer creek, just a branch of the larger-flowing Pena. This morning the Luchanino was swollen with the past few days’ rain. It was no longer an obstacle the Germans could merely step across, they would need to bridge it. Between the villages of Syrtsev and Luchanino, the ground on both sides of the river was flat terrain, mostly carved into cornfields. The crops had been spared the bombardment of the night, the shells had arced over the tall stalks. According to Valentin’s maps, these were dense minefields. Dimitri tried to imagine a place in the world that was not mined or armed. He could not, because every place he’d ever been in his life was today at war. The cornfields, simple and honest stands of maize, had at this moment enemy sappers crawling on their bellies to burrow at the roots. The little village of Luchanino, not much different from his own village in the Kuban, was today glutted with guns to beat the enemy away from the river. The river, rippling and oblivious, would run scarlet before the day was up.

Dimitri looked over to the tank trench dug weeks ago by Just Sonya and her citizens of the steppe. He wondered where the woman was right now. Quickly he added her to the list of people he asked God to protect, and wondered if he wasn’t taxing God’s patience somehow, there must be a million men asking for the same right about now.

His son, standing in the turret, spyglasses up, screamed, ‘Down!’

Dimitri dove to the rain-soft ground one second before he heard the whistle. A round hit twenty meters behind him, rocking the soil, spraying a black shower distressingly high.

‘What was that?’ he shouted up to Valentin, clambering with Pasha and Sasha for their hatches.

‘Tank.’

‘Tank? Jesus.’

A Tiger, he thought. An 88 mm cannon. It must be. It’s here.

‘Jesus,’ he said again to himself, diving into his driver’s seat.

Behind him Valentin dropped into his own seat and buttoned his hatch. Boots came down to Dimitri’s shoulders. Both toes tapped in fast unison. Crank the engine.

Dimitri pushed the starter and the General shuddered. Valentin on the intercom ordered Pasha to load an antipersonnel shell, and Dimitri again stared into the blankness of the dirt wall. He wanted to ram the gears into reverse and get the hell out of this ditch but first the German assault had to come closer, the T-34s had to stay hidden and protected to get off the best shots against the enemy charge.

Dimitri worked himself into a sweat, flexing his hands in and out of fists, rapping his knuckles against the hard, close armor around him. Sasha never took his eyes off him. Dimitri fought the urge to yell at the boy to take his red face around or catch a smack on it. Valentin and Pasha worked well in the turret, firing another dozen shells in quick succession. They were aiming at German artillery positions or troops advancing down to the river. Lobbing rounds at armored tanks from this distance would be a waste. Valentin, his foot on the firing pedal, his eye to his periscope, muttered to himself: ‘Hang on, hang on, hang on… safety off… and…’

The tank shook with the report.

‘No.’ Valya had missed. ‘Five degrees left.’

The turret whined, Dimitri heard his son’s hand ratchet the long gun’s elevation wheel. ‘And…’ Another shell exploded out of the barrel. Dimitri reeled in his seat. ‘No. Shit. Another round! Now!’ The turret rotated one or two degrees. Pasha rammed another shell into the breech, then scurried in his racks for the next round.

This went on for minutes. Valentin and Pasha fought the war while Dimitri ground his teeth and glared at green gauges and dark nothing. Sasha wrapped himself in his thin arms and collapsed into his space. The motor idled with restive energy, the General wanted to get moving, too. A tank was not designed to be motionless, it was a mobile platform for a big gun. Dimitri idled with the General, popping, joggling and anxious.

Explosions jarred the ground around their T-34. Valentin and the rest of their tank squad buried on either side of the General continued to trade shots with the German big guns across the river. At last, in the wake of a few very loud and close shells, Valentin gave the order. The words were accompanied by the dancing of two boots on Dimitri’s shoulders.

‘Let’s back up. Fast. They’re getting our range.’

Dimitri jammed the gear shift into reverse and hit the accelerator. The tracks spun and everyone in the tank pitched forward from the backward speed he used to get out into the daylight. In a second, a shaft of sun glowed in Dimitri’s vision block. He leaned his forehead into the padded periscope and through the rectangle of glass watched the tank shed its dirt sheath.

When the General was on level ground, Dimitri caught his first glimpse of the battleground before and below him. The cornfields on the southern bank of the Luchanino were trampled under the feet of many thousand running soldiers. They ran in a wide column; their sappers had cleared a big channel for them through the mines. German fusiliers ran to the riverbank to secure it for their pioneers to bring up bridging equipment. Across the river from the attackers, on the north bank, the village of Luchanino was lost under a pall of Soviet gunsmoke, a thousand steel throats screamed at the Germans to go back! Behind the men rushing to the fattened stream, Dimitri saw tanks rolling forward. At this distance the enemy were little more than dots against the ripped-up earth of the steppe. But the rounds falling on all sides of the General shook the ground with awesome force, and this from miles away!

Valentin shouted, ‘Driver, right!’

Dimitri jammed the tank into first gear. Valentin headed him west across the ledge of high ground looking down on the river villages. Valentin opened his hatch to stand in the shattering morning. Dimitri leaned forward and propped up his own hatch, widening his view. His jaw hung at what he saw.

Five of his brigade’s tanks were in ruins, smoking charnel even in their protective ditches. The German cannons had reached out and blown them to pieces. Two of the tanks were in flames, shafts of greasy fumes throbbed into the heating day. The others were just dead, crumpled like paper boxes into themselves, a gaping hole in each askew turret knocked from their fittings. This was why Valya had pulled the General out of its redoubt, to get back the tank’s best defense, to become a moving target.

Dimitri charged ahead along the ridgeline. The other four tanks in their squad plus a half-dozen others had dislodged themselves from their dirt casings and were doing the same, back and forth like giant picnic ants around a stomping foot. What now? The T-34’s 75 mm gun couldn’t even dent the German tanks across the river, the General’s main gun barrel wasn’t long enough to generate the shell speed needed to penetrate their heavy tanks, not from two miles, not even from one mile! But even from this distance those big, unseen Tigers and Panthers had the power to sit back and knock a T-34 out. The morning was a shooting gallery for them, and all Valentin and the others could do was hunker and fire spitballs or dash around in a dither. This is our first meeting with Hitler’s new tanks, Dimitri thought, and judging from the results, the little Austrian bastard was right to wait for them!

A round landed twenty meters in front of Dimitri’s path. The earth geysered.

‘They’re finding the range,’ he said into the intercom. ‘We’re getting bracketed.’

Valentin made no response.

Dimitri downshifted. He yanked back on the left-hand steering lever and shoved the right forward. The tank hauled into a left turn. Dimitri shifted up into third gear and sped straight down the hill.

‘What are you doing?’ Valentin shouted. A boot pressed between his shoulder blades, and when Dimitri did not stop to the order, the boot heel kicked him.

‘Load up,’ Dimitri called back, ignoring the pain beneath his neck. Through his open hatchway he watched the green field tear up beneath his tracks. ‘Check your maps, make sure we don’t go through a minefield.’

‘What? Turn around, turn around!’

‘Valya, listen. Don’t fucking kick me again! We can’t do a thing up on that hill. I’m going to take us down to the river. Signal the squad to follow. We’ll make a pass at top speed, I’m going to get you a shot in close. You’re the best gunner in the company. Take it, and we’ll get out.’

‘We don’t have orders to do that!’

‘You’re the squad commander. Give the damn order!’

Dimitri glanced over at Sasha. ‘What do you think, Cossack?’

‘Go!’ the boy hollered, a nervous thrill in his eyes. ‘Go!’

‘Hang on,’ Dimitri called into the intercom. ‘Valya, wave your hanky. Pasha, kiss a shell!’

Valentin barked in Dimitri’s headphones, ‘Damn it!’ When Dimitri did not slow or veer off, he grabbed up a banner from behind his chair back. He unfurled the blue flag and stood in his open hatch, waving the pennant over his head, the signal for the four tanks in their squad to follow the General Platov. Only command tanks in their corps had radios, the rest had to make do with smoke canisters and pennant signals. When the other T-34s had formed up into a column behind him, Valentin ducked down and buttoned his hatch. Dimitri smacked his lips and thought, That’s more like it, charging with your son and comrades under a battle flag. That’s how a Cossack fights.

The slalom down the long slope was fast and careering. Dimitri snaked left and right to stay out of any German’s range finder. The world through Dimitri’s open hatch was divided in half, the upper portion blue and clean, the bottom was all battle shroud and flying bits of crop and dirt. He yanked the General side to side, knowing it was impossible for Valya to find and target anything in the turret on this kind of wild ride. He’d have to do it at the bottom of the hill, and fast. Right now, Dimitri could not slow.

A shadow raced over the ground beside the General. Dimitri didn’t hesitate: He skidded the tank into a tight turn away from the dark shape flashing across the smashed cornfield. Twin rows of soil bounded into the air in the path he might have taken. The bullets stitched away, then quit, and the siren of a diving Stuka screamed through the clank of his tank when the plane tore past. The Stukas had learned to come at Red tanks from behind, trying to score a hit with their two 37 mm antitank guns on the engine compartment, which sometimes blew up and took the tank and crew with it. Dimitri’s forearms were beginning to smart from the exertion of swinging the levers back and forth over the bumpy, speeding terrain. He thought one more time about his daughter, and marveled again at the enemies she had to face in the air. Too fast for him; he preferred the ground, hooves and tracks. That Stuka will be back. Dimitri shifted into fourth gear and let the General roll as fast as it could, straight down the hill.

The demolished buildings and silos of Luchanino began to fill his restricted vision. He caught a glimpse of the sun glinting off the swollen river. Tracers and small-arms shredded the flowing water, trying to stop the German engineers floating across it on pontoons to establish a beachhead on the north shore. Behind the ducking, paddling pioneers stood a phalanx of four tanks, all Mark IVs. Every cannon seemed to point at the rushing General, Dimitri had no idea if the other four tanks in their squadron had kept up the frantic pace down the slope. The four German tanks were painted in the same camouflage tan scheme.

‘See them?’ Dimitri called into the throat microphone.

‘Yes.’

‘Sons of bitches. Where’s their big brother? Afraid of you, Valya, I’ll bet. Best damn gunner in the Red Army.’

Valentin laughed. His feet came back to Dimitri’s shoulders, a gentler touch this time.

The field just outside the village where Dimitri raced his tank was filled with dug-in men and weapons. Soviet antitank gunners with their long-barreled weapons lay belly down behind dirt embankments, machine-gunners squatted in shallow foxholes, and fresh, hot craters were filled in seconds with men looking for cover in the earth. Dimitri scurried his tank in and out among them, angling closer to the buildings at the water’s edge, waiting for Valya to give him the signal to turn and stop for him to acquire the Mark IVs and fire. The armor close to his head rang with the pings of small-arms fire banging against the General’s side. The lineup of German tanks must be going crazy waiting for this column of mad careening Red tanks to come to a stop.

‘Range, one thousand meters,’ Valentin intoned.

‘Closer?’ Dimitri asked.

‘Closer.’

Dimitri gunned the tank farther down the hill, his padded head took a buffeting in his hard driver’s space. He aimed the General at the remains of a barn along the riverbank. He intended to nestle behind it out of the sight of the German tanks. Their platoon of five T-34s could group there and decide on their attack. The Mark IVs would be less than five hundred meters away. That ought to be killing range.

Dimitri executed a sharp swing to the left. One more ‘S’ turn ought to bring them down to the lee of the barn. This time through his open hatch he saw the Stuka coming. The last two tanks in the platoon had not turned yet, their tails were still facing the path of the low-rushing German buzzard. Sasha saw the Stuka, too, and squeezed his machine-gun, the gun shook his whole body trying to keep it steady and aimed on the plane, but the fighter-bomber bored in behind his own bigger, raging guns. Dimitri watched the last T-34 in line, the tank driven by the other old man in the company, the Caucasus goatherder Andrei, take the hits. The chassis of the tank bounced under the tank-killing bullets ripping up its back, as though some giant stood on the tank and jumped up and down. The Stuka roared past, banking hard into the sky, a sort of coward, thought Dimitri, rushing away from the men and machine it left still and smoking, all dead.

Now they were four against the four German tanks. Dimitri sent a curse trailing after the rising Stuka on behalf of friendly Andrei, and in answer to his damnation a Sturmovik fighter swooped into the German’s route. The two planes gnarled in the air, fighting to the death on equal terms. Dimitri wanted to watch the Stuka get his desserts but the two planes left his vision. He returned his attention to the wreckage of the barn. The four Mark IVs had not issued a shot. Dimitri drove the General in fast behind the barn, Valentin’s boot told him to stop there. Valya flung open his hatch and stood. The three remaining tanks in their squad pulled up behind him.

Valentin leaped out, was gone for thirty seconds, then spilled back into his hatch, snapping his helmet into the intercom and kneeling low. He called out the orders to his crew over the idling General’s rattling hum.

‘We’re going to go first, Slobadov’s tank will be right behind us. As soon as we clear the barn, Kolyakin and Medvedenko are going to emerge going the other direction. We’re going to split their attention four ways, right and left. Papa, I need speed. This close to the Germans, if we run straight sideways to them, we’ll need to make it hard for them to keep us in their sights. Once we’ve gone far enough, you hit the brakes. I’ll take as many shots as I can, then you get us back up that hill.’

This was a dangerous tactic. Running sideways to the Germans exposed the T-34’s tracks and its weakest armor, the side plating. Every tank is designed to have its thickest armor in the front. But this sideways run also would get Valentin and Pasha at an angle to the Mark IVs, at their own vulnerable sides.

It was going to come down to who was better in his range-finder, and who was fastest on the trigger.

Dimitri closed his hatch. He reached up to crack his fist on Pasha’s boot.

‘Pasha, kiss that first shell and name it Katya for me.’

‘Sure, Dima.’

Dimitri caught Valentin looking at his loader, assessing the boy coldly, as if Pasha were metal, and Valya wondered only if the loader might break down under stress. Valentin saw whatever he needed, then returned to his seat. Pasha smiled down at Dimitri, assuring the old man he would not break, then got into his place, too. Sasha swung himself back to his machine-gun.

Above Dimitri’s head, the turret whined and pivoted. Valentin and Pasha walked around the rubber matting to stay behind the swinging gun. Valentin brought the cannon around to the right, past ninety degrees, where he thought he’d be taking his shot once the General galloped out of cover.

‘AP,’ Valentin ordered. Pasha hefted an armor-piercing shell. Dimitri heard the smack of his lips in the intercom.

‘Go get him, Katya,’ the boy said to the round before slamming it into the breech.

‘Sasha?’ Valentin called.

The machine-gunner answered, turning away from his gun portal. ‘Yes?’

‘What’s your mother’s name?’

Sasha grinned at Dimitri, as though telling the old driver that his, their sergeant, wasn’t so bad, see? He was a good hetman after all.’

‘Tamara.’

‘That’s our second shell, then. Ready? Papa?’

Dimitri told himself he was rarely ready for the things his son displayed. But there wasn’t time to ruminate over it right now. If they died together in the next minute, he could wrestle Valya all the way to heaven until the boy made sense to him. But now…

‘Ready. Good luck, my boys.’

Valentin paused, like the moment before horse and rider were cut loose in the village war games. Saber raised, melons strung from trees…

‘Go!’

Dimitri popped the clutch and hit the accelerator, the goosed tank spun up a cloud and took off. Dimitri was in second gear even before the General cleared the barn walls. Over the rumble of bounding steel Dimitri heard a ringing report; one of the Mark IVs had taken a potshot at them when their nose appeared around the building. The German missed, Dimitri’s revved-up General was too quick. But that was only for the first round, they were certainly loading another, and there were three other enemy tanks.

Now Valentin fired. The General heeled over onto the left track from the concussion of the blast, with the cannon fully sideways to the chassis and the treads bumping over corn rows. Jolted, Dimitri kept his hands and feet pressing more speed out of his machine, shifting into third gear even before the General could get both tracks back on the ground. Pasha fumbled the second AP shell, Dimitri heard it clang on the floor, but the boy scooped it up and got it into the breech in time. In his ear, Valentin urged, ‘Go, go, go…’

Dimitri wound the T-34 as far as he dared take the transmission. He watched the rpm’s shoot past the point where he should have shifted, he begged the General to mind him and hold a moment more with the building speed. His prayers were lost in the rising whine of the engine. He waited, then stamped on the clutch, threw the gearshift into fourth, and the General heaved forward, relieved and running for all it was worth. He looked at nothing, not through his small slit, not into his periscope, just at the jumping green walls around him; he reached out with his senses five hundred meters to his right, across the river, to the four German tank commanders, wishing them sudden blindness and palsy.

Then Valentin yelled, ‘Now!’

Dimitri’s foot smashed on the brake. He downshifted as fast as he ever had any machine in his life, in his heart a horse reared its head at the suddenness of the pull on the bit but dug in its hooves, heeding its rider. Dimitri leaned back in the saddle and pulled harder, the horse came still, the grinding tracks of the T-34 settled and dust flowed over them. They were motionless and in the open, broadside and six hundred meters from four enemy tanks.

Dimitri’s pulse pounded in the single second before Valentin moved. He looked over his shoulder to watch his son. The boy laid his left foot on the firing pedal, the turret slipped a few degrees more to the right and Valentin hopped on the other boot to keep up with the rotating cannon. His eyes were locked in to his periscope. Pasha stood beside the loaded breech, another shell cradled in his arms. A further second pounded inside the tank as though it had come from a blow against the armor. Valentin’s hand turned the elevation wheel.

‘Yes,’ he muttered, ‘come on…’

Dimitri wanted to reach his hand up and push down the firing lever himself. Christ, boy! he thought, shoot! We’re not measuring them for a new fucking suit, we’re trying to kill them! Shoot!

Valentin’s boot toed the firing pedal: The cannon erupted. The report was thunderous, the breech shot back and the smoking casing flipped out, but before it could bounce twice Pasha had the next round in the big gun and Valentin made a small adjustment to the elevation. He toed the pedal again and the tank rocked, another immense bang shook the tank and the breech spit another shell. The compartment stank with the gases but Dimitri had no time to wrinkle his nose, he had to dodge his face away from Valentin’s oncoming boot, the signal to get the General running, and fast.

Dimitri worked the levers and gears to the sound of Pasha and Sasha shouting, ‘Go, go, Dima, come on! Go!’ Bounding away, Valentin traversed the turret around to face front again, for better balance and speed.

‘Well?’ shouted Dimitri. ‘Well?’

Valentin made no answer for a few moments. Dimitri guessed he was turning his periscope back to the Mark IVs, to read the damage while speeding away.

‘Two Mark IVs burning. One smoking. One missed.’

‘What about our tanks?’

‘Medvedenko,’ Valentin said. ‘Disabled. The crew got out.’

Dimitri drove hard, swerving up the hill, but he hadn’t gotten out of second gear yet. His shoulders and arms ached from grappling the levers.

‘What?’ he asked the frowning face of Sasha.

‘We go back. Right? They’re alive.’

Dimitri had been too busy flailing the tank back up the hill to consider this.

‘No,’ answered Valentin over the intercom. ‘We do not go back.’

‘But…’

‘I’m not risking three tanks to rescue four men, Private. They’ll have to fight where they are.’

‘You said so, Dima.’ Sasha addressed Dimitri now. ‘You said a Cossack will die for someone in his clan.’

Dimitri grinned at Sasha, even through his mounting fatigue. The General swung and accelerated up the hill.

‘Yes. I did say that.’

Pasha piped up from his loader’s position. ‘They’re in our clan, Sergeant. They’re tankers, aren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ Dimitri answered before his Soviet son could.

‘And we’re the Cossacks,’ Sasha implored.

We’re the special ones, Sasha was saying. This freckled boy understood.

Dimitri spoke up. His voice shook with the effort in his hands maneuvering the tank. He’d brought them halfway back to their lines.

‘Valya. We vote to go back.’

Valentin spluttered in Dimitri’s earphones. ‘You… you don’t vote! I said no.’

Dimitri whipped the tank to the right, to circle back down the hill. Sasha held on while the tank jolted, shaking a skinny, childish fist at Dimitri in approval. Dimitri aimed the T-34 down the hill, grabbed the gear knob to shift into third, then froze. The blunt barrel of a pistol appeared beside him, in Valentin’s hand.

Dimitri gazed at the gun. He thought, Well, let’s see if the little shit is man enough to make it stick.

He flung the gearshift into third. The General plunged ahead. Dimitri posted a stupid grin on his face.

‘Yes, Valya, I see it! It’s a lovely pistol, but I don’t think we’re going to need it just yet. Put it away and get your big gun ready!’

The pistol hung in front of Dimitri’s face for another second, then withdrew. Dimitri shook his head in a small, rueful rattle at the shame of this.

The tank lumbered into the air, bounding off the lip of a crater, then crashed down and kept running. Everyone jarred. Dimitri knocked his padded head and wondered if this constant banging of his noggin was going to make him silly one day when he got old. He balled a fist, hollered, ‘Faster, General!’ and laughed. Death was everywhere, in the Germans’ waiting tanks, in his son’s mean cowardice, in the sky with its stinking Stukas. And Dima Berko was alive in the middle of all of it, shaking his fist and howling.

‘Are the other three still with us?’ Pasha asked.

Dimitri didn’t know. He had to keep his eyes forward to get back down to the river and the barn. Valentin was the squad leader, and General Platov was the lead tank. The others were still under Valya’s orders. They’d be to the rear. Valentin would have to find them through his rotating periscope.

‘Yes,’ Valentin answered. ‘All three.’ Reluctance stained his voice. Dimitri considered: His son was no coward. No, the boy was a Communist. Three tanks for three men. Valya was right – it was a rotten risk – and he was so wrong.

Two hundred meters away, smoke curled from both sides of the river. The burning Mark IVs were in full flaming bloom, their fuel and ammo had been set off. Gray trails billowed from the engine compartment of the third tank but it was rolling. The fourth patrolled back and forth along the riverbank. To the right of the barn, Medvedenko’s T-34 was ruined, its left-hand tread shot off and lying in pieces behind it. The tank smoldered, black smoke boiled out of the open hatches. One of the remaining Mark IVs had put another round into the Red tank to be certain it would not be rescued and repaired later. Dimitri drew closer. At one hundred meters, flinging the General to and fro to keep the German tanks from drawing a bead on him, he saw Medvedenko’s crew, hunkered behind their blazing T-34. Only two men squatted, waving at Dimitri’s onrushing tank. Two others lay on the ground.

‘They’ve got wounded,’ Dimitri called into the intercom.

A burst of small-arms fire from across the river tattooed the glacis plate around his hatch door, tang-ting-tang. Dimitri angled the General to run alongside the bank. His wrists ached, the veins in his forearms were as swollen as the river. At top speed he brought the T-34 between the downed tankers and the river, then shut down his pace, broadside to the still functioning and dangerous twin Mark IVs. In the turret, Valentin was already acquiring a target, mincing in his small circle with the traversing gun. Pasha on his knees raked in his racks for shells. Dimitri shot a glance at Sasha.

‘Go.’

The boy did not hesitate. He reached down between his legs and yanked the handle to the escape hatch. The door lifted and the thin lad slithered out between the treads, then pulled shut the hatch. Close by the General, a report boomed. One of the T-34s in their squad had gotten off the first shot. Dimitri couldn’t see the result. In the blue steppe sky, white scrawls displayed the ferocity of the air battle taking place. Below, for miles running west along the river, every meter of the battlefield bore guns and men exchanging fire, wisps of smoke showed where triggers were pulled, shells struck, lives were taken. Here, almost privately on this small plot of cornfield and river beside a shambled barn, the two Mark IVs and three T-34s defined the war, a rescue and a fight to stop it.

One of the T-34s pulled ahead of the General, Kolyakin angling for a better shot at the roaming Mark IVs across the river. Dimitri kept his own tank still, shielding Sasha while he helped Medvedenko’s crew climb on the Generals back with their wounded. Valentin poked his head out of his hatch to check on the progress of the scrambling men and boys. Dimitri heard him holler down at them, ‘Get on, get on!’ The turret swiveled again, Pasha shoved in another shell, Valentin toed the firing pedal and the tank recoiled. Something across the river took the hit, Dimitri heard a terrific metal din.

‘They’re on,’ Valya yelled. ‘Go! Get out of here!’

Dimitri floored the gas. Kolyakin’s T-34 in front of him began to roll out of his way. Then, with a wrenching clang, Kolyakin’s tank was hit so hard it reared over, almost flipping on its side. The turret ripped off the tank’s body, a ball of fire gushed from the beheaded chassis. The noise was horrific, a gutting. Kolyakin’s turret rolled like a boulder behind his devastated tank, spewing flames and black fumes. Dimitri was stunned in the handful of seconds this obliteration played out in his hatchway. He muttered to himself, ‘Tiger.’

Valentin screamed it. ‘Tiger!’

That jolted Dimitri into action. He rammed on the brake, shifted the General into reverse. He swung his tail around fast, putting the rising hill behind him now, and laid on every bit of backward speed the tank could give him.

He faced the Tiger on the far shore. The thing was mammoth, the first heavy German tank Dimitri had ever seen. Its main gun was so long the tank seemed to want to tip forward onto it. The Tiger was boxy, its armor not slanted like the Soviet tanks. But it looked solid, terrible and lethal.

Dimitri ran backward up the hill, keeping his thick frontal armor facing the Tiger, and presenting the T-34’s smallest profile as a target, a broad triangle. Valentin shouted to Pasha, ‘AP! Now!’ The boy must have already had one of the armor-piercing shells in his hands because the breech was loaded in an instant. Dimitri kept his foot smashed on the accelerator. Anyone behind him had better fend for themselves, he would not see them to dodge. His eyes were fixed on the Tiger, needing to anticipate the movements of the huge 88 mm cannon to stay out of its lethal path. He thrashed the tank left and right, and hoped Sasha and Medvedenko’s crew were still clinging to the General’s deck handles. To give them a smooth ride right now would kill them all.

Valentin managed to rotate the General’s turret around to face the Tiger. The other two tanks in their squadron were tearing away from the riverbank and the scorching pyre of Kolyakin’s tank. The Tiger opted for the easiest of his three Russian targets. Slobadov made a wide, circular turn, choosing speed over evasion. The Tiger let go one round, a fountain of dirt rose at Slobadov’s rear. A perfect smoke ring spit out of the big German gun. The Tiger adjusted its aim to Slobadov’s flight. The turret waited, drawing the proper lead. Slobadov wasn’t swerving enough, Dimitri knew, and the Tiger’s gun yowled. The big tank barely rocked with the report, the thing was so immense. Slobadov’s tank was hit in the rightside chassis, above the wheels, by an armor-piercing round. No flames or explosion blew from this dead T-34. The tank ran another twenty meters, swung toward Dimitri’s retreating window, then stopped. A hole the size of a bread loaf gaped in the armor; Dimitri knew there was little left inside the tank that would resemble a man. The Tiger puffed out another perfect smoke ring, some kind of infernal hallmark.

The Tiger’s turret paused, still aimed several degrees away from them. It appeared to be admiring its kill. Dimitri had propelled the General eight hundred meters from the river. In another minute, they’d be far enough out of range to turn around and run up the hill in forward gears, faster to safety. He hit the brake.

‘Take a shot, Valya.’

His son was ready. The T-34’s turret whirred left, the gun was depressed a few degrees to the riverbank below. The one surviving Mark IV had moved behind the Tiger, like a handmaiden to the hulking queen.

Valya fired. The General shivered behind the shell. The blast kicked up a dust cloud, and Dimitri hit the gas again, not waiting for the roiled dirt to settle. Backing away, he caught a glimpse of the Tiger. It stood impassive, haze drifting off its face where the AP shell struck, unhurt and swinging its turret straight toward Dimitri.

‘Shit, shit, shit,’ Dimitri mumbled to himself. He desperately needed speed. He could spin the General around pretty fast, but fast enough?

Before he could act, another shadow grazed the ground, streaking over the crushed stalks and upturned earth. ‘Shit!’ That was all that was missing, another Stuka.

But it was not a German plane. The guns roaring at the Tiger and her attendant on the riverbank told Dimitri that this was a Sturmovik. The pilot came in low and hot, blazing away at the Tiger, lifting a veil of torn-up ground and hot metal between the General and the massive German tank. Dimitri stopped the General and spun around. Shifting gears, he heard Sasha and Medvedenko outside the tank raising their voices in an ‘Urrah!’ One last glimpse at the riverbank showed the two German tanks withdrawing. In their wake were seven dead vehicles: three Mark IVs and four T-34s. The General Platov was the sole surviving member of their squadron.

Dimitri ran the T-34 up the hill as fast as he could. Infantrymen cheered and raised their rifles when he sped past their positions, they’d watched the entire confrontation from their holes. Valentin said nothing, gave no orders to Dimitri but sat stony while the General crossed into the second Russian defense belt and hurried to an aid station at the rear.

Away from the front line, Dimitri shut the tank down. He leaped from his seat to lend a hand lowering the men off his tank. Aid workers rushed forward with stretchers. Dimitri and Pasha both put their arms up to receive little Sasha down from the turret. He yelped when Pasha took him by the arm. Sasha had been winged, his first battle wound, a bullet had nipped his left biceps. His tunic was torn and stained with blood, but his eyes were clear and his color remained that of a carrot. ‘Get that looked at,’ Dimitri told him. ‘We’ll wait. Pasha, go with him.’

The two boys followed the stretchers. Medvedenko walked up to Dimitri. The young sergeant was white-faced from his adventure down the hill. He was unshaven and unnerved.

‘Where’s Valentin?’

Dimitri jerked his thumb up at the General’s turret. Valentin had not come out yet.

Medvedenko looked at the General, it was undented. He patted the fender, as though the tank were a talisman of luck. ‘I’ve got to go find another tank and a crew’

‘Alright. We’ll see you when you get back.’

‘Tell him I said that was fucking brave.’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean it.’

Dimitri pointed behind Medvedenko to Pasha and Sasha, headed for the medical tent. ‘Tell them.’

The sergeant nodded and walked off after the two boys. He’ll get his spine back soon enough, Dimitri thought. No shame in being scared when you think you’re going to die beside a river, naked outside your tank, unmanned like that. No shame in thinking Valentin Berko is a brave man. What does Medvedenko know? Only what he sees. The General came back for him.

He gripped a handle and hoisted himself up onto the T-34’s deck. Gore from the wounded slicked the armor. The new General Platov was blooded now. It had performed well. Dimitri patted the tank’s warm turret, then stepped around the stains.

Valentin’s hatch was open. Valentin sat on his commander’s seat, his soft helmet doffed, a map spread across his lap. He lifted his eyes to the shadow falling over his hatch. He looked up into Dimitri’s face. The boy’s cheeks were filthy, black outlines marked where his goggles had been. The grit made him look older, seasoned.

Valentin lowered his eyes back to his map. He said nothing.

Dimitri could reach down and grip him by the throat, pull him up out of the tank like a salmon out of a river, he could do it, man or no man, this little Communist pissant. It felt stupid, leaning over like this, his head only one foot above Valentin’s, the two of them not speaking. Dimitri wondered, Is he mad at me? What was I supposed to do out there, wave goodbye to poor Medvedenko and his crew, wish them luck there beside the river with ten thousand Germans making ready to cross? Won’t risk three tanks for four men! What the hell does he want, how does he expect to fight this damn war? Waiting for orders, doing only what he’s told, dying on the Soviets’ schedule?

Dimitri sat on the fender, dangling tired legs. Valentin stayed inside the General, silent armor separated father and son. After several minutes, Dimitri saw Pasha and Sasha returning from the aid tent. Plucky little Sasha’s arm was wrapped in fresh white gauze. Both boys waved to Dimitri. A jaunt was in their steps, veterans now, one of them wounded. Dimitri turned to look again down into the hatch, into the pool of shadow where Valya sat, head bent over his maps.

He may not be a Cossack, this boy, he thought; the Communists may have undone that.

‘Hey,’ he said down into the hatch.

Valentin did not lift his head at the word. His hands plopped onto the map, crinkling it. ‘What.’

Dimitri squatted on his haunches, closer to the opening. ‘Medvedenko said to tell you he’d follow you into hell. Said you were his hero.’

Valentin made no response.

Dimitri reached down to pat his son’s shoulder. He climbed off the General to hear Sasha brag about his first bullet and his bandage.

July 7 2350 hours outside the village of Stepnoe

Thirty-two horses stopped in the darkness when Plokhoi hauled back his reins. The leather of saddles and boots creaked and the metal jangle of rifles eased. At the head of the pack, Plokhoi spoke to one of his lieutenants posted at his side. A black mile off, across an unhindered plain of field, a village glowed with the pallid light of lanterns, winking stars, and a quarter moon.

Katya had named her partisan horse Anna, after her favorite Tolstoy novel. Anna was the name she’d given to the first pony Papa presented her when she was only ten; she figured this horse might prove to be her last in this life, so why not go out where you came in? Anna was quick and responsive to Katya’s touch, even though the animal showed little affection for her new rider. Despite the lack of nuzzling, Katya trusted this horse, and thought how quickly trust blossoms in wartime. You trust the person ducking in the hole with you, you trust the ones wearing the same uniforms, and the ones you do not know who give the orders. You may not even know their names; they share an enemy with you, and that’s all you ask in war. But in this rag-tag collection of farmers and lost soldiers she rode with tonight, she knew there was a traitor, and so trusted only Anna, the knife in her belt, and the loaded rifle across her lap.

Plokhoi turned in his saddle. The little light made the man’s deep eye sockets look empty.

‘Witch.’

‘Yes.’

‘Up front. Josef, you too.’

Katya nudged Anna to the front, beside Plokhoi. Josef rode up from the edges of the group.

Plokhoi pointed to Stepnoe village with his nose.

‘You two reconnoiter. You’re father and daughter, if anyone asks. If there’s trouble, head west. We’ll wait here thirty minutes.’ Josef wheeled his mount away and trotted off to the village. Katya nodded to Plokhoi. The colonel returned the gesture. She spun Anna to follow.

Josef rode well. He knew his way around a horse. Katya told him so. The man made no answer.

‘If we’re going to be father and daughter, we ought to talk, don’t you think?’

‘Plokhoi said if anyone asks.’ Josef did not turn his head. ‘No one has asked.’

‘Why are you mad at me? What did I do?’

‘You chased off the pilot.’

‘Lumanov.’

‘If that’s his name.’

Katya wanted to defend herself; she hadn’t chased Leonid off! She’d come to rescue him, just like Josef had. Things went wrong, it wasn’t…

Josef swung his weathered face to her. ‘The partisans is no place for pretty girls on a lark. Do your job, Witch. Stay out of my way.’

Pretty girls? Did this dirty farmer know anything about the Night Bombers, their battle, their rickety planes puttering over enemy targets in every kind of weather, facing night fighters and spotlights and flak, the plummeting deaths in flames? She could ride circles around this old mule Josef and scream at him for all the Witches he’d just insulted. But Leonid had told her, sacrifice is courage. She clamped her teeth. She would sacrifice her anger right now and be silent, there was a mission to do in the approaching village. She had a job, as Josef had snarled at her. She’d do it. And like the pretty Night Witches had shown the male pilots, in every theater they’d flown, about courage and sacrifice, she’d show these partisans here on the ground.

They entered the village. It was arranged around a central dirt street, lined with three dozen small houses. Every house had a tiny garden plot behind it, fenced in with chicken wire and moldering boards. Even in the wan light, Katya could tell the single-story shacks were done up in pastel colors, their porches and cornices decked with gingerbread flourishes. These were steppe peasants, folk who lived their entire lives in three-room homes, toiling in the rich fields where ancestors had done the same and now watched from graves nearby. These were the farm districts collectivized by Stalin in the decade before the war. The people in these houses were starved and threatened, brutalized by their leader, until they accepted his methods. They gave up their lands to the State, and worked in their private gardens only when their long days in Stalin’s fields were done.

Katya and Josef rode down the middle of the road. Other horses tied to posts or in stables whinnied at their arrival, but the partisan horses – like Josef – were determined to remain quiet and surly. Wagons leaned on empty traces in the street; there were no machines, no tractors or cars. All these would have been requisitioned by one army or another long ago.

Katya noted curtains eased back in several windows, lit eyes watched them wandering the village. No one greeted them, no one was even outside the houses. In the far distance, over the northern horizon, the booms of the battle coated the clopping of their hooves.

The Germans had been here, that was clear in the earth. Tracked vehicles had left gouges on the lone dirt road, and in the fields, crops were crushed. But no sign of the occupiers showed in Stepnoe tonight.

‘I’ll go get Plokhoi,’ Josef growled at Katya. ‘You wait here.’

With that he pivoted his horse into the dark and galloped. Katya eased forward in the saddle, stopped. A door opened in a nearby house. An old woman stepped out from a yellow interior. She came right up to Anna and stroked the horse’s brow with fingers like dried twigs.

‘You are with the partisans,’ the woman said.

‘Yes, mother.’

‘Please leave us alone.’ She said this to the horse, as though she knew beseeching Katya to be useless.

‘It’s not my decision.’

‘We have only a few men here. They are old, too, but we need them to work the fields. If they don’t we will starve.’

The woman did not lift her face to Katya. This was the way of the Russian peasant, beaten and badly used by Tsar and Soviet alike. The war had brutalized this little worthless village as profoundly as it stalked the battlefields twenty miles to the north. These people were killed, too.

Katya carried some dried meat and crackers in her pockets. ‘Are you hungry?’

At this the old mamushka lifted her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I think I shall be tomorrow.’

Other doors opened. Villagers edged into the street, the little houses contained a surprising number of people, perhaps a hundred, two-thirds of them were women. The men wore cloth caps and dark jackets, even on a warm summer night, the women came in white blowzy dresses and decorative aprons. There were no bare pates, all heads were under hats and scarves, these peasants covered themselves to go outside, even in front of their own homes to beg a stranger. Every face was wrinkled, every eye a sad witness.

They clustered around Katya. Anna held still. Katya, high in her saddle, felt like another plague sent down among these people, come to skim away the last of their vitality. She looked the gathering crowd over and knew right off which ones Plokhoi would take, that one and that one, those two look like brothers, yes, and there; there might be twenty or more who looked strong enough to mount the final few horses left to this village and ride off with the partisans to fight. And what would be left? She looked down at the first old woman to come outside, the bold one, still caressing Anna’s soft muzzle.

The village people said no more to Katya than ‘Please,’ and ‘We can’t.’ She had nothing to say in response. She sat in their midst for the minutes until Plokhoi rode into the street. In ones and twos they worked their way to her boots in the stirrups, some stroked her leg, others the horse. None looked up at her. Anna heard the pounding of the many coming hooves before the old folks. She stamped a foot once and the people stepped back.

Plokhoi and his partisans rode into town looking like a band of brigands. They advanced tightly packed, their dark horses rubbing shoulders, the riders grimy and slouched in the saddles. There was little military bearing to them, even though many of the men had been soldiers before they joined Colonel Bad and his cell. The villagers edged back to the side of their dirt road.

The mounted cadre stopped. Katya and Anna stood between the two crowds. She backed her horse out of the way.

Plokhoi’s mount strode forward. He spoke, a black voice on this pallid night.

‘Where is your starosta?’

A snowy-bearded old man stepped forward. This was the village elder. Even he was straight-backed and strong; the times in this land were harsh and they formed hard men to live in them.

‘Here, sir.’ The peasant took off his hat and would not look up at Plokhoi.

‘You know who we are?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. You will send ten of your able-bodied men to come with us.’

The elder’s hands worked his hat in a circle, turning it by the rim. ‘Please, sir. Please.’

Plokhoi’s horse shifted under him, an impatient movement from the animal. His voice matched the horse’s gesture.

‘Please what?’

‘Sir. I am sorry. This we cannot do.’

Plokhoi’s horse moved out of the pack of dark partisans. The animal came close to the starosta and tossed his head. The old man made no move to back away, but the turning of his hat quickened.

‘Please?’ Plokhoi repeated from high above the peasant.

The elder clutched his hat now, stopping his hands. He spoke but could not raise his head to answer, as if Plokhoi’s boot were on it.

‘Sir. The Germans. They’ve…’ and the old man quit.

‘They’ve what?’ Plokhoi demanded over the elder’s bowed head to the rest of the village. ‘The Germans have what? Have they been such good masters to you in the two years they’ve occupied your land that you won’t rise against them now?’

Plokhoi slung his legs down from the saddle. He walked away from the horse, leaving it untethered, and the animal stood still. He strode to the middle ground between the villagers and the mounted partisans. He lifted both arms.

‘We greeted the Germans, didn’t we all? We met them with bread and salt. They were supposed to be our liberators from Stalin and his henchmen, they were the ones to set us free from the tyranny of the Communists. Hitler couldn’t be worse than Stalin, we said. We were all hopeful.’

Plokhoi lowered his hands. He nodded to the people.

‘I was, I know. I hated Stalin. I saw the steppe fill with the graves of starved women and children, next to wheat fields that should have fed them. I watched comrades be jailed, exiled, or shot for raising their voices against the repressions. So I was first in line when the Germans came. I waved my arms in the air.’

He walked past the starosta to an old woman. Flesh hung from her face, in the quarter light of the night Katya could see her hunger. Her neighbors stepped away from her now that the partisan came close.

Plokhoi reached for her hand. ‘How many of your men have the Nazis taken, mother?’

The woman lowered her chin, but with his free hand, Plokhoi lifted her face to his.

‘How many, mother?’

‘Half.’

‘Half your men.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve lost half my men, too, mother. Should I tell you about it? They were left beside a railroad mound, unburied, to rot like cabbage.’

Plokhoi held the old woman’s hand for a long moment, then let her loose gently. He stepped back to address the villagers.

‘Your men, the ones the Nazis took. They were executed. Two of your men for every one of theirs killed by the partisans. I know this. I’ve seen the bodies hung outside this village. I’ve seen it in other villages, too. You were ordered by the occupation police to let them hang for two weeks before you could cut them down and bury them. Two weeks!’

Katya imagined the gallows of corpses dangling in the middle of this little collection of pastel houses, the people shuffling past their husbands, brothers, cousins, friends, watching them turn blue-black and crow-pecked. She saw the bodies piled beside a railroad. Her mouth went dry.

Plokhoi raised his voice.

‘And others. They were taken to Germany as slaves. I know this, too. I was captured from my home in Poltava. My brother, as well. But I escaped. My brother’s in Germany somewhere, starving worse than you, beaten every day, spit on. Instead of a gun, he carries German slop buckets.’ He unstrapped his carbine and with one hand he hoisted it over his head.

‘I carry the gun.’

He held the rifle high for several seconds, a statue of dark resistance; in Katya’s mind he stood beside the gallows, defying it, equaling it. Then with a clatter he lowered the gun and strapped it back over his shoulder.

‘So will you.’

Silence descended in the village, broken only by a shifting horse, a squeak from a saddle.

The starosta linked his knotty hands in front of his face. He held them up to Colonel Bad, as a counterweight to the gun, a prayer perhaps to equal the partisan’s command.

‘Please,’ the old man said again. ‘I ask you to let us alone. My people have…’

So much was on the old man’s tongue. He wanted to tell all to this partisan gang come out of the darkness, all the stories of his village’s sufferings. But Katya knew Plokhoi would not be moved by suffering. And the starosta knew this, too, for all he could say was ‘I beg you, please go away.’

‘No, father. That is something I cannot do.’

Plokhoi pivoted to his waiting horse. He stepped into the stirrup and mounted, rising again above the peasants and their plea.

‘Ten of you. Get your horses and come with us. Now.’

No one moved. Plokhoi sighed and shook his head. He doffed his cloth cap and ran a hand through his hair. A bead of sweat trickled down Katya’s back. Artillery thunder from the north filled the moments until Plokhoi returned his hat to his head and spoke.

‘Father.’ The partisan folded both hands over his saddle horn. ‘Which is your home?’

The starosta pressed his hat closer to his chest. He hung his bare head.

‘Go to it,’ Plokhoi told him, ‘and bring me all your food.’

The elder did not move.

‘Old man. I will pick a house.’

At this, a woman in the crowd bolted up the street with a swish of skirt. She was the elder’s wife, sister, it didn’t matter, she obeyed when her man would not. Nothing moved in the minutes while she was gone but the jittery horizon.

Katya watched Plokhoi and his band glare down on the villagers. Plokhoi wanted to save these people, and to do this he would hurt them. Three years ago, Plokhoi had chosen Hitler over Stalin, until the one became an even greater monster than the other. Tonight the villagers chose, between the German invaders and these looming, dangerous partisans. None of the choices for Plokhoi or these peasants had come to them with mercy.

If Leonid had been saved by these partisans instead of her, would he sit here on a horse and watch like she was? Or would Leonid speak up to defend the old village, to ask that they be left alone as they pled? She tried to imagine Leonid blank-faced and grimy, one of Plokhoi’s men, she tried to imagine him cruel, and could not.

Carrying a woven basket, the old woman ran back up the street. Now, breathing hard, she offered up the basket to the partisan leader. Another partisan rode forward to take the food. Katya saw a few loaves and leafy vegetables, a pittance of victuals to fill the stomachs of a household. Plokhoi did not acknowledge the basket or the woman. She looked surprised, then frightened. Plokhoi rode away from the crowd and his motionless cadre to a nearby barn. He dismounted, took a square bale of straw, then walked along the dark street where the woman had gone.

Moments later, the windows of a house began to flicker. Plokhoi emerged from it and walked back to his horse. He climbed into the saddle, carrying something. He rode forward. The house behind him glowed brighter until it was clear the lapping light was flame. Plokhoi rode up to the starosta and handed down to him a lantern out of his little house. The lamp was unlit and, Katya knew, drained of fuel.

The elder and the crowd did not know what to do. Heads turned to the burning house, then crept back to the partisan on the tall horse gazing down on them. The old man slipped his hat back on his head. His role as leader for the village was over. He stepped away from Plokhoi. No one spoke to him or touched him. The woman stood rooted in the street where she had handed up her basket, hiding her face in her hands, sobbing beneath the crackle of burning wood.

Plokhoi’s demand rose above the fire and the murmuring villagers.

‘Ten men! On horses!’

The elder did not raise his head to select the men. Katya couldn’t tell if his burden was loss or shame. Again, it didn’t matter; neither had come to him mercifully.

The men from the village chose themselves. More than ten of them assembled in the street on horseback. Three were told by the others to stay behind, with muttered instructions of care for the women and the work to be done in the village with ten fewer backs tomorrow. The burning house collapsed on itself, spewing sparks and smoke high while the men gathered and said goodbye. The new riders hurried, Plokhoi didn’t have to say a word to them. When they were ready and lined up, Katya saw the resolve on their faces. They’ll hate Plokhoi, she thought, but they’ll fight the Nazis. These old men will get the chance to die not as foreign slaves, not strung up as reprisals, but fighting. They have been given the chance to live. That was the choice Katya herself made when she joined the war as a Night Witch, and again when she decided to stay with the partisans.

Plokhoi wheeled his horse, forty-two others turned with him. Katya guided Anna to the rear of the partisans riding off into the starry fields. The yellow light of flames from the burning house flickered across their backs.

July 8 0130 hours the village of Vorskla

Five miles away in a neighbor village, Plokhoi collected fifteen more fighters. He did not have to burn any homes there, he left the place dim and intact. The village starosta himself stepped forward and joined the partisan band. Standing beside Plokhoi, the elder announced it was time to rise. His followers, most of them family, brought along rifles they’d cached from the battles of the past year or stolen from careless German garrisons in the area. These men mounted good horses and rode away from their wives and peasant lives with a flair that struck Katya as both brave and comic. The new recruits raised the spirits of the ten farmers Plokhoi had commandeered from the other village an hour before. Katya rode in the middle of the expanded pack. These newest men surrounded her, the only woman in the cell; it seemed natural for these farmers who were riding off to be heroes to protect a woman, even a partisan woman who rode away with them.

Plokhoi led the cell into the center of a vast bean field, away from any village or road. Far off, on the edges of the field, the lights of a vehicle or two bumped over dirt trails. These were German security patrols making a half-hearted effort, none of them wanted to encounter a partisan group in the dark. None of the riders made a sound or lit a cigarette, the new men picked up the clandestine ways quickly. Plokhoi dismounted, carrying his box radio.

Colonel Bad squatted in their middle, hidden by the many haunches and hooves. The radio came to life and Plokhoi’s features glowed lime by the dials. He held a receiver to his ear, a microphone to his lips, and muttered, talking with partisan headquarters somewhere. She could not hear him, she only caught him saying one thing: ‘I have a druzhiny again.’

Plokhoi finished with his radio and took his seat in the saddle.

‘We have orders,’ he said. ‘North of us, the Germans have broken through between Syrtsev and Alekseyevka. They’re stepping up their rail traffic to keep supplied. We’re to move to the Borisovka line and break the tracks in as many places as we can.’ He checked his watch. ‘We need to move if we’re going to get it done tonight. Ivan, how much wire have we got?’

The heavy-set partisan reached behind him to pat his saddlebags. ‘One,’ he said. Two others in the crowd did the same and counted off.

‘Three reels, Colonel,’ Ivan concluded. ‘Who’s got the C-3?’

Five men sounded off.

‘Caps?’

Another five said yes.

‘Alright,’ Plokhoi said. Without another word, he urged his horse out of the center of the riders. The partisans fell in behind him. Plokhoi did not break into a canter, he kept his band at a brisk walk across the bean field. They moved with eerie quiet for fifty-seven riders, like a moon shadow. Katya had no idea that for days she’d been riding with men carrying explosives, blasting wire, and caps. She didn’t know much about such things, but she guessed these were dangerous things to gallop with in your saddlebags. This partisan cadre wasn’t just stolid men with rifles roving the countryside: They were a bunch of disassembled bombs waiting to be put together, aimed, and exploded. Riding in their dark core, with them spread out on both sides of her like wings, she felt a little like a pilot again, part of a dark shape gliding through the night, loaded with bombs, heading for the target.

Skinny Daniel, big Ivan, and glum Josef were never far from her. Plokhoi must have assigned her to them, since they’d rescued her instead of Leonid. A punishment, perhaps. That would explain Josef’s instant dislike. She pushed Anna through the crowded partisans, to pull alongside Plokhoi.

‘Witch,’ he said.

‘Colonel. Has there been any information about Lieutenant Lumanov? On your radio?’

‘No.’

‘Have you asked?’

‘No.’

‘Colonel…’

‘I take orders. When I’m told to pick up a downed pilot, I send men to do it. When he disappears, I send men to do something else. Watch the sky tomorrow, Witch. There’s a downed pilot every two minutes. What do you expect?’

There was no coldness in the man’s voice. He expressed what all of them knew and feared most, that each was expendable in the higher goal of defending Russia. So what did Katya want more? To search for Leonid or to stop German supply trains from feeding the enemy’s armies? She wanted to say Leonid; Katya thought, Couldn’t it be that way, just once?

Plokhoi watched her with an intent expression.

‘Tonight I’m sending two teams, five men in each. I can’t risk more than that. You’ll go with…’

‘I know. Ivan, Daniel, and Josef.’

‘What’s the matter, Witch? You don’t like your bodyguards?’

‘I don’t need bodyguards.’

‘We’ll see. I’ll send along one new man with each team. You take the starosta. He’s got spunk, that one.’

Katya knew she could trust the starosta. He could not be the traitor, none of the villagers could, they’d just joined the partisans tonight. But what about Plokhoi himself? Why doesn’t he want her to find Leonid? What is he afraid of? Is Colonel Bad himself the informant? If she finds Leonid, will she find the secret to the spy in their cell?

Katya nodded. She glanced at the radio, the size of a bread box, strapped to Plokhoi’s back alongside his carbine. The metal box was the only way to find Leonid, to speak into it and beg for whoever was the power behind these murky partisans to send more men to find him. The radio voice, the unseen authority in the air, would ask her, What do you want, Katerina Berkovna? What would she answer?

Plokhoi said, ‘Go back, Witch. We’ll be splitting up in ten minutes.’

July 8 0145 hours four kilometers north of Borisovka

Big Ivan lay in the dirt beside Katya.

‘Pour some more,’ he urged in a whisper.

Katya tipped the little bottle of vegetable oil and dribbled it over the man’s meaty hands.

‘See,’ he spoke with the voice of a purring bear, ‘the C-3 is hard like a brick when you take it out of the wrapper. You got to do it like this, like bread dough, to make it soft. That way, you can shape it any way you want. Here. You do it.’

Katya did not reach for the gray explosive clay. Ivan held it out to her.

‘It’s not going to blow up, girl.’

Ivan smacked a fist into the lump. Katya jerked. Nothing happened.

‘It takes an explosion to make it go off. That’s what the caps are for. Here.’

Still, Katya hesitated. He stuffed the clay in her hands. Under the cast of a slim moon dicing through the leaves overhead, Katya noted Ivan’s palms were stained. Kneading the C-3, her own hands began to turn gray.

‘It makes your skin yellow,’ Ivan said, grinning, showing teeth that were gray, too, under the moon and branches.

While Katya and Ivan molded the explosive, Daniel and surly Josef re-wrapped the long coil of electric detonation cord out of Ivan’s knapsack. The starosta knelt, peering through the bushes where they hid. The village elder’s name was Filip Filipovich Platonov. He had a son – also Filip – fighting somewhere with the Red Army. The boy’s letters had stopped a year ago, and the elder knew nothing more. Katya guessed how old the man was, probably more than sixty. His face had collapsed around his hawk nose, he had high cheekbones and a brow like a white awning to make his face sharp, years of hunger and labor had rooted in his flesh. Many of the men from his village who’d joined that night carried the same lean look, the same predator’s nose.

A hundred meters away, the Borisovka rail line ran over flat ground. To make the tracks easier to protect from partisan sabotage, the Germans had mowed down a wide swath of trees beside the tracks for miles in every direction. Tonight, two-man patrols walked the rails with flashlights. The guards ambled past every four to five minutes, shining their lights down at the rail ties. Filip watched them without blinking, with a bird-of-prey focus.

Ivan wiped his hands on his jacket. The C-3 became malleable in Katya’s grasp, she was excited by the danger, the peril of rolling a powerful explosive in her fingers. She imagined them all going up in a red burst out of her hands.

Ivan breathed, ‘Daniel?’

The thin one came close. He and Ivan had both been regular army soldiers, privates. Each had been captured by the Germans and escaped, and both had been found separately wandering behind enemy lines by the partisans. Daniel had been born in this part of the steppe; he told Katya that Plokhoi had stopped him from going home. With the partisan band they risked their lives just as much as they had fighting on the front lines, but now in civilian clothes they enjoyed more status – now they were considered even more as military men. Plokhoi had made them leaders.

Daniel brought out from his jacket pocket two small wooden cartons. He handed them down to Ivan, who took the boxes with uncharacteristic gingerness. The big man set one aside and opened the other for Katya, as though showing her a gem. Inside, on a bed of cotton, lay something that resembled a copper bullet casing with antennae.

‘Blasting cap,’ she said.

‘Definitely.’ Ivan raised his grin to Daniel, squatting next to them. ‘They say I’m the dumb one, but I’m smart enough not to carry these damn things around.’

Daniel didn’t mind the gibe. He brought down a slender finger to the cap, such a clean and comfortable thing, in bed in its little wooden home.

‘These babies have a bad temper. Ivan’s too clumsy to carry them. He falls down a lot. You do that with one of these in your pants, you don’t get up the same man.’

Katya snickered at this, drawing a shush from Josef. The older man kept himself apart while spooling the long detonation wire around his arm.

Daniel continued, unchastened. ‘Here’s how it works. The C-3 explodes at a rate of about twenty-five thousand feet per second. To detonate it, you need to make a faster explosion. That’s why C-3 won’t blow up if you just burn it or hit it. That’s where the blasting cap comes in. You push the cap into the plastique, hook these two wires up to the electric firing cord, send a current down the wire, and the cap goes off just a little faster than the C-3.’ He raised both hands. ‘Boom.’

‘Boom,’ repeated Ivan, savoring the word and the concept.

Daniel lifted the little cap off its cotton pillows. He fingered the twin slender wires sticking out of one end. The wires were crimped together in the middle by a tiny round tab.

‘They’re very sensitive, these bastards. Anything can set them off. So once you got the C-3 stuck to whatever it is you’re going to blow, and you got the wires attached, you make sure you take off this little piece. This keeps the two wires touching, see? To short them out. Once this is gone, the cap is live.’

Daniel returned the copper detonator to its case and closed the lid. He reached down to scoop up both boxes. Ivan took the doughy C-3 from Katya’s oily and stained hands. She wiped them on her pants, like Ivan. When they were clean, Daniel handed her the two boxes.

‘You and me, Witch.’

Katya hefted the twin cartons, almost weightless in her palms. She waited for Daniel to tell her he was kidding. ‘Me?’

‘Why not? At this point you know everything the rest of us know about this stuff.’

Josef stalked forward. ‘You and Daniel are the smallest and quickest. You’ll go.’

The urge pulsed in Katya to mount an argument, that she’d never done anything like this before. But she looked around at ox-like Ivan, crotchety Josef, and ancient Filip – the elder gazed at her with a ‘you want me to go?’ shrug – and clamped her lips. Suddenly she missed her U-2 and the thousands of feet she used to have between her and the Germans.

‘Fine,’ she whispered. Josef finished with the firing cord and checked his watch. He laid the wire on the ground and crept to the edge of the bushes to join Filip. Daniel grabbed up the long black loops and hoisted them over his shoulder, they hung almost to his boots. He found one loose end and handed it to Ivan. The large man dug in his knapsack for the handheld detonating machine and set about stripping the firing-cord wires. Katya held the blasting-cap boxes one in each hand, very aware of keeping them cozy and still. Her palms began to sweat, and she wondered how sensitive these temperamental caps were to nerves.

They waited for another five minutes. No one moved, except Josef, who glanced up and down from his watch to the strolling, then disappearing, German guards and their flashlights. Katya knew there was another five-man demolition team waiting a mile south down the track. The plan was simple for each squad: two in the team set the charge; one stays on the detonator; two slither out and try to bag a prisoner for Plokhoi to interrogate. This was the Battle of the Rails, fought throughout the occupied territories, designed to disrupt the flow of German trains to the front. The Russian road system was so primitive the Nazis had no choice but to rely on the railroads to supply their men and weapons. The partisans knew this and carried the fight to the enemy here. But tonight, Katya hoped, there would be no fight, just a quick strike.

The Germans had lax security at this point in the Borisovka line. At other spots – bridges, bends in the line, downhill runs, all places where the partisans were most likely to hit – the Germans maintained garrisons and watchtowers, and even this was a partisan victory because every enemy soldier safeguarding the railways against the guerillas was one more German soldier not battling on the front. Plokhoi may be a madman, he may even be as bad as his nomme de guerre implied, but he was clever and disciplined. He hewed to the partisan motto: Attack the weak, fly from the strong.

Katya held the two cap boxes apart as though they might react even to each other. How could Daniel carry them around like they were candy bars? She looked at her partner kneeling beside her. He was reed-thin and chewing a blade of grass. He nodded to himself, some song or pulse playing in his head. She had seen her horses do this at the starting line years ago in the dzbigitkas, champing, bobbing, ready to bolt. Ah, well, she thought, Papa, another podvig. Where are you? You used to love to watch me race. So, watch now. Here we go.

She sensed the starting moment come, and it did. Josef lifted his face from his watch and whispered, ‘Go.’

Daniel moved first, lugging the long links of cord. Katya stumbled out of the bushes; her heart leaped into her mouth, she started to use her hands to catch herself but couldn’t because of the caps. She struck a knee to the ground and expected to explode. She didn’t, and heard Josef cluck his tongue in disgust.

Daniel lit out for the rails, she followed in his wake. The moonlight out on the flat, cleared ground was milky, just enough of a silver wash to discern shapes at close range and no more. To their right, about fifty meters past them, a two-man patrol had already gone by, playing their beams on the rail ties. Skinny Daniel skittered bent at the waist, the loops of the cord dragged the ground and Katya was afraid of the noise they made scurrying to the rails. She ran awkwardly, too, with both hands before her, still wary of offending the blasting caps. But the guards continued to move off on their rounds and the two reached the tracks. They collapsed on their bellies beside the rails, catching their breaths, trying not to betray themselves from the exertion of the run.

Daniel mopped his brow. Even in the measly light Katya saw the beads of sweat glisten around his eyes. She sat the twin cap boxes in the dirt, relieved to let them loose. Daniel dug into his jacket pocket for the slippery lump of C-3. He handed it over to Katya.

Her hands smeared with the oiled stuff again.

‘Push it against the track,’ Daniel breathed to her. ‘Make it stick.’

She worked the explosive clay against the closest rail, molding it to the smooth warm contours. Daniel busied himself with the blasting caps, easing them from the containers. When he had them both out, he waited seconds while Katya finished forming the C-3 to the rail, then pushed both caps into the putty, leaving the tips and wires exposed.

With his knife he cut a short piece from the end of the firing cord, then stripped away the waxy sheath to expose bare wires at both ends. He twisted the wires to connect one cap, then the other, they were now hooked in sequence. Katya guessed the second cap was a backup in case the first one didn’t blow. She watched him strip the end of the hundred-meter cord and wire it to one of the caps, astonished at the speed with which the partisan could do this minute work. His long fingers were precise as a musician’s, playing over the little wires on this dark and dangerous ground. Daniel connected the caps in under a minute, working on his stomach with precious little light. Katya kept her ears open, and heard nothing but the pitter of Daniel’s knife and his elbows in the dirt. The last thing Daniel did was remove the crimps from the blasting-cap wires. The caps were now live.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he whispered when he was done. He lifted the circles of cord over his shoulder again and got to his feet, still backing away from the rails, unraveling the first loop onto the ground. Katya had no work to do, her hands were free. She wanted to run for the shelter of the bushes and her comrades, but she stayed beside Daniel while he laid loop after loop on the ground.

Katya watched for the guards to turn and come back their way. She listened for any unwelcome sound, her skin prickled with every crunch of her boots and the complaints of the unspooling wire. Daniel, a lean young man, began to huff with the effort of carrying the wire. Katya was hyper-alert and scared. She looked everywhere into the night, except where she was walking. She tripped over the wire under her feet.

She did not catch herself, that would make more noise, but folded into a ball and rolled to her side on the earth. Daniel made an angry grunt. They were halfway between the rails and cover. Daniel froze in place. Katya lay still, petrified that her stumble had betrayed them to the strolling guards. Daniel looked up and down the tracks and saw no reaction from the sweeping flashlights. He shook his head at Katya, then resumed his careful backward gait. She rose from the ground, humiliated at her clumsiness, knowing she would hear it from Daniel if they survived that she was an even bigger oaf than Ivan. What if she had done that while carrying the blasting caps? A cold tingle bristled over her shoulders.

The load across Daniel’s back lightened with every unleashed coil. He quickened his pace and Katya stayed to the side, letting him play out the last lengths of wire. When they reached the bushes, he had only a few loops left. Big Ivan slipped out of the shadows to take the remaining cord.

‘What was that?’ he growled at Daniel.

‘Our ballerina here.’

Katya slid into the bushes behind exhausted Daniel. Josef and Filip were gone into position to do their part of the mission and nab a prisoner. Relieved not to have to bear an angry stare from Josef or a bemused grin from old Filip over her tumble, she hunkered behind a thick bush and peered out to the tracks.

Ivan bared his wrist and raised his watch to a sliver of moonlight so he could read the time. He lifted the small, boxy blasting machine into his lap. With a knife he stripped the sheathing from the end of the blasting cord and fastened the bare wires to the terminals of the box, then screwed in the T handle. Earlier, Ivan had explained to Katya how the detonation machine worked; the box was nothing more than a magneto. When the handle was spun fast, a pulse of current – forty-five volts – shot down the blasting cord to the caps and set off the explosion. Ivan completed the detonator assembly, set it between his knees, and fixed his gaze on the dim hands of his watch.

The German guards were far down the track now. They would amble forward another minute, then turn and follow their beams back this way. Katya wondered where Josef and Filip were. Would they act now, while the night was tense and quiet, or wait for the C-3 to go off and make their grab in the echoes and running confusion?

Ivan whispered to himself. Katya turned her attention to the big man curled behind her. The detonation box lay tucked in his abdomen, the wire led away from his gut. He counted, looking at his watch, ‘…four… three… two… one…’

Ivan twisted the handle. Katya whirled her head around, eager to see the blast.

Nothing.

She heard Ivan twirl the handle again, and again, but the curtain of the night stayed down. Then, from far off to their left, a boom gushed up the rails. The other squad. They’d blown their track.

Daniel spun an angry face at Katya.

‘It’s you. You tripped on the wire.’

Ivan cursed behind them. He turned the handle one last time, then set the detonator hard on the ground. He scrambled up to Daniel and Katya. ‘Now what?’

Daniel glowered at Katya. ‘Yes. Now what, Witch?’

Katya fought to stay calm. It was her fault, but it was an innocent mistake. Just a stumble, anyone might have done it, it was dark, the wire was black, she’d stayed by Daniel to be helpful… she wanted to plead this to the two furious faces so close to hers. She was humiliated and frightened all at once; their anger crackled in the air while the explosion farther down the track died. They had failed because of her.

She looked out to the tracks. The German guards held their spots down the rails, unsure what to do; should they rush in the direction of the sound, should they keep walking, or hold still? They cut off their flashlights and melted into the dark. They knew there were partisans around. Katya sensed they were as scared as she was.

Daniel’s breath soured in her nostrils. Seconds had passed since the other squad’s explosion.

‘Well?’ Daniel tilted his head. Ivan swallowed so loudly, Katya heard his throat work.

Daniel hissed, ‘We have to blow the tracks.’

Katya was crowded, by the blaming hot eyes of the two partisans, by dread leaping in her chest. By the thought of facing Colonel Plokhoi without wrecking these tracks, and being the one to blame. I’m not brave, she said to herself, I’m not this brave.

A horse pawed the ground. She must quiet the horses before they made the situation worse. This gave her a reason to get to her knees and crawl away from Ivan and Daniel. The two men said nothing when she pushed past them. Do they think I have a plan? she wondered, hurrying to the animals. I don’t.

Then, looking at the horses milling nervously, she did. It would be a podvig, the greatest of her life. Likely the last of her life.

Katya flung herself at the first horse in line, scrabbling to unstrap the girth to slide off the saddle. She risked noise to work fast, calling Daniel and Ivan over to help. The two hurried to her side.

‘Get these saddles off. Move, move. And the harnesses. Everything.’

The three stripped the horses of saddles, blankets, reins, and bits, piling them all on the ground with as much quiet as haste allowed. The six horses stood freely in a bunch, laying shoulders to each other, questioning the humans’ dire energy and the removal of their bonds. Katya took the harness last off Anna.

She stroked her horse’s muzzle. ‘We have a job to do, girl,’ she whispered.

Katya swung herself up onto Anna, bareback.

‘What are you doing?’ Daniel asked her.

‘I’ll be back,’ she said. ‘Wait as long as you can.’

Katya kicked Anna with a heel to turn her out of the bushes. Daniel and Ivan stepped away and faded in a second behind her under the sound of the six horses cantering in the open. Katya clung to Anna’s mane, tugging left or right in play with her boots to lead her clever little horse and the following pack across the hundred-yard plain, to the rails.

Her instincts were right. The partisan horses were unaccustomed to being ridden alone, they’d always traveled in the band of men, never less than in a small group. Tonight, even without tack, they collected tight around Katya and Anna. Their run made no human noise, there was nothing of leather or metal about them in the darkness, they were just a tiny herd of spooked and naked horses that had jumped some fence, frightened by the blast a minute ago.

She rode low, hugging Anna’s neck. She’d been the best bareback rider in her village, better than Papa even. Valya had no peer with a saber but she could always outride him. Anna snorted, excited to be in the lead like this, her rider so close as to be part of her.

Katya kept her head inside Anna’s flying mane. She sent her eyes up the tracks, seeking to spot the guards somewhere in the night. Where were they? The tracks were fifty meters away, another twenty seconds.

A flashlight popped on, a white sword swinging at the sound of the hooves. Katya slid to her left, away from the patrol, down Anna’s midsection. She squeezed both arms hard around the horse’s neck. In straining fists she clutched the mane and flattened herself to Anna’s galloping ribs. When she was a girl she could pick a fallen hat off the ground at full gallop. The horse running alongside bumped against Katya and loosened her grip, nearly knocking her off. Katya gritted her teeth. Her arms and knees burned, Anna’s breath and the other horses’ snorting nostrils and whipping legs filled her senses, blending with the pain in her muscles. Between Anna’s pounding hooves the ground flashed, lit by the sweeping flashlight. The light stayed on the running horses for seconds, then moved away. Katya used most of the strength she had left to hoist herself up just enough to glance over Anna’s bounding back, up the tracks. The flashlight remained on, but had returned its gaze down to the tracks. The two-man German patrol was headed back this way

She kept Anna running straight, cuing the horse with pressure on her neck. The other partisan mounts jostled her, her grip waned in her horse’s mane, her calves and hips burned. Every ache from the crash of the U-2 came back to scream under her skin to let go! Katya growled deep in her throat, a savage sound of will and terror and anger.

She could hold on no longer. Her hands were slipping from Anna’s neck, her legs unwrapped and Katya began to slide off. Smart Anna sensed her rider’s release and slowed. Katya’s boots dragged, then her fanny and shoulder hit the dirt, and she was down. She skidded, biting back a grunt in the kicking dust. Anna galloped unleashed in a small circle, then came back, leading the others to where she’d dumped her rider.

Katya lifted her head, muzzy from the fall. The horses stood around her, panting and pleased, snorting and bobbing their heads. She laid a hand to the ground to roust herself, she couldn’t just lie here, no matter how much her body hurt. With a surprise that was too great to be mere relief, almost a shock at her luck, her fingers brushed on the black firing cord, running beside her to the tracks only ten meters away.

She shook her head: She needed to be clear-headed, or she would be dead in minutes. Scrambling to her feet, she crouched behind the horses. She took Anna’s muzzle and walked her and the other five horses the last steps to the rails. Holding Anna by the mane, Katya shooed the others away, smacking one on the rump to make them skitter off and grab the attention of the coming guards, leaving Anna and Katya behind at the C-3.

She pressed flat beside the rail. Fifty meters off, the guards’ flashlights glanced up at the pack running away from them, then lowered to the tracks again. Anna stood still, disguising the dark form of Katya fumbling with the wires.

Katya’s hands felt racked and unruly, her fingers rejected any fine movement. She pulled back from the blasting caps for a moment, to catch her breath and gain control of herself. Her heart beat thunderously in her ears. The guards strolled closer every second; now she could hear their voices, their boots on the gravel beside the rails, their flashlights were the brightest things under the lackluster moon and stars. Now, she thought. Or, really, never.

She leaned into the C-3, close enough to smell Ivan’s vegetable oil. She could not stop the tremble in her fingers so she let them hover above the caps, gingerly touching the wires until she found the place that had come undone. The firing cord had been pulled away from the first cap by her stumble, the stripped copper wire stuck straight up, cooperative and easy to repair if the sun were high and her hands did not quaver like a divining rod and an armed German patrol was not bearing down on her. Katya pulled her hands away again from the task. She commanded them to be still and obey. She filled her lungs with the steppe night and held it. Anna bent down to see what her rider was doing in the dirt. Katya pushed the probing muzzle away. This touch – an old and familiar feel, a horse to her hand – brought her a moment of calm and remembrance. That was all she needed.

German voices sped her hands to the wires. She grasped the loose antennae of the blasting cap, pincered the copper length of the bared firing cord in her other fingertips, and twined the wires together, two, three, four turns. She couldn’t be certain the contacts were good, but there was no more time. The first daubs of a flashlight’s beam trickled at Anna’s hooves.

Katya stood. She grabbed a handful of Anna’s mane and started to run. Anna broke into a trot. Katya hopped and bounded onto Anna’s back, tucking low to meld with the horse’s silhouette. She ducked her head and gripped the horse hard with her weary arms and legs, sliding down again to ride unseen away from the patrol.

She was less than ten meters from the rails when the C-3 blew.

Anna reared. The horse stumbled and neighed, hurt. Katya felt the blast through the animal’s muscles, Anna was lifted and smashed down by the explosion. Katya held on by instinct, not thinking to let go. Clinging to Anna’s ribs, Katya screamed. The horse seemed broken in the middle, she collapsed as two horses, the upper part wrenched in agony, the lower half still running.

Anna lost her balance in a few wild steps and crumpled over, hitting the ground on top of her. Katya tried to scramble out but her legs were trapped. The weight was too much, Katya couldn’t even kick at the horse. Anna convulsed, screaming, grinding Katya into the black dirt. Katya cringed at the agony of the shuddering animal across her thighs and ankles but couldn’t make a sound: The German patrol might hear her. She gritted her teeth and blew slow breaths. The patrol had shut off their flashlight at the blast. Through the red haze in her eyes and the injured horse’s terrified breathing, she no longer knew where the Germans were.

Struggling to sit up, she looked over Anna’s heaving side. The horse had been ripped open at the abdomen, intestines spilled on the ground and lapped across her trembling shoulder and flank. The moon stole the color of Anna’s workings, her guts were gray and pulsing, blood ran black. Tears ran down Katya’s face. Her horse was in agony. The report of the explosion had faded away now and Anna’s cries would bring the guards right to where Katya and she lay. They’d put a rifle to Anna’s head to finish the poor beast, then do the same for Katya, the trapped partisan.

Anna shivered. Her hooves crawled in the dust, not understanding what had happened, believing that the answer was to run, always the state of a horse’s mind. Katya could do nothing for her horse but to die alongside her. She lay back down, looking at Anna’s panicked eye, unblinking and beseeching, You are the rider, you can lead us away from this. Katya stroked her neck and lifted her gaze from the dying horse to the stars. Her vision had cleared, the pain in her legs had gone numb. Anna breathed fast, in deep gulps, as though she were indeed running.

Why did the C-3 go before Katya was clear? What happened? Too late, she thought, it’s too late, she would die with questions. She tried to think of Papa and Valya and the war, how would they turn out, where was Leonid? The universe of stars and moon and the years of her life focused down to a pinpoint, a single dark mote here on the ground, Katya, living her last bits second by second in the dust. Enough. To end with a horse seemed right, a horse had been the dearest thing in her life, so this was proper, it was better than an airplane, after all.

The guards spoke out of the darkness. Katya heard the metal slap of a rifle bolt. Anna answered with a nicker, an absurd last appeal to the new human voices, maybe they will be better riders. Boots crunched in the gravel. Katya sat up again.

She drew the knife from her belt sheath. She would not let the Germans finish her horse, this was the Cossack’s final responsibility. With her left hand smoothing Anna’s ears, she slid the blade deep into Anna’s throat to open an artery. The horse did not jump at the new sting. Blood flooded over Katya’s fist and the horse’s head relaxed in her hands. The wild eye closed. She lay the horse’s unsuffering crown back to the earth.

The guards approached. The tracks had been blown fifty meters from them. Partisans were near, danger lurked, so they crept forward with caution.

Katya had only a few more seconds before the darkness was not enough to hide her. Anna’s blood dripped warm and sticky in her hand. She gasped, like a woman coming up from under water, then shut her mouth. She knew what to do.

She untucked her tunic. With the knife she cut a hole in the shirt above her belly. Sitting up as far as she could, careful to make no sound, she reached for a handful of Anna’s intestines, sorting fast through the wet morass to take only the small bowels. When she had a wet gob of them in her hand, she sawed the blade of her knife through the guts, slicing a portion away. She stuffed the entrails into the hole in her tunic, like stuffing a scarecrow, leaving a length of them dangling out. With both hands, she cupped blood out of the horse’s gaping cavity, fighting a need to retch at the heat of Anna’s bowels snuggled against her own warm skin and at what she was about to do. Holding her breath to keep her stomach from pitching, she smeared the blood over her face and neck to the sickening smell of copper, she cupped more and splashed blood around the hole in her shirt and Anna’s bulging bowel. Urgency and fear carried her past what she was doing, wallowing in gore, salt blood on her tongue and matting her hair. With only seconds before the creeping Germans were near enough to discern more than a dead horse, she drove her knife into a bulging section of Anna’s large intestine. The bowel burst at the prick with a gassy pop and a stench blew out that made Katya retch; she caught the vomit halfway up her throat and fell back, eyes closed, a silent prayer on her blood-painted lips.

‘Ach,’ said one of the Germans. The voice came from about ten meters away. Their boots stopped on the gravel. ‘Was riecht so faul?’ The voice was nervous, and disgusted.

Another few wary steps.

‘Das Pferd.’

The dead horse across Katya’s legs began to hurt her again. She kept her breathing as shallow as she could, to still her chest, to play dead. She opened her mouth and put an agonized grimace on her face. The boots left the gravel by the rails and scraped in the dirt, joining closer to the horrid mound under which Katya lay pinned. Anna’s blood began to cool on her cheeks and neck.

The flashlight clicked on. Behind her lids Katya sensed the beam play over the dead horse. The light washed over her.

‘Partisan.’

‘Ja.’

‘Sie sind nahe.’

The two guards walked in a wide circle around Anna’s carcass; behind her lids Katya watched the beam move and fall on her. The stench of the open bowel was keeping these two at bay.

‘Ach,’ one said again, ‘der Geruch.’ He cleared his throat and spat. ‘Sheisse.’

The boots halted a few meters away. The flashlight played full on Katya’s face. She needed to breathe, her chest burned. The light searched her.

‘Genug.’

A pistol cocked.

Another step was taken in the dirt.

Katya longed to scream, to sit up and scare them away, bloody ghoul, suck in a great breath and call for help, something, anything except lie here posing as dead with her last moment! A bullet was aimed at her brain. No, no, she thought, panicking without moving a muscle, no flinch marred her brow, but her body was coiled to spring up and surrender, she held it back, she was a catapult, every fiber tensed to rise up and fling her hands in the air and shout No! She fought herself, she willed her body to stay rigid as the dead.

‘Nein, Hans, nein. Partisanen. Die werdeu uns hören. Shhhh.’

The light stayed pressing across her eyes. The world was at an end inside Katya’s yellow glowing lids.

The boots near her head stepped again.

‘Ja,’ the pistol said, ‘ja, sie ist tot.’

The flashlight clicked off.

The guards’ boots moved back to the tracks, crunching again in the gravel. Katya’s body sagged with relief. She kept her eyes closed and sipped a long, greedy breath through her nose. She heard the Germans murmur, they were looking over the rail that had been severed by the blast.

She lay marveling that she was still alive. The blood coating her hands and face grew tacky, the odor of the popped intestine renewed itself in her nostrils now that she was breathing again. She could not imagine a way out of her predicament and did not waste her attention trying to figure, she waited in amazement that the clock still ticked on her life. She listened to the guards curse the partisans for the shattered rail.

One of the guards sounded as if he might puke, he made heaving noises behind a clamped mouth. The other voice went mute. Katya heard a brief scuffle on the gravel, something laid down. She kept herself still, she fought the strong urge to look, her only chance of survival was to be dead.

The bootsteps stayed near the tracks. Then, after a short silence, they tromped near her, two sets. They stopped on either side of her head. She kept the veil of a tortured death mounted on her face, the congealing horse blood began to itch. Her held breath burned in her lungs. Above her, a tongue clucked. The man standing over her sighed.

A call – a loud, raspy whisper – issued from down the tracks. ‘Was ist los? Giht’s was?’

The one who’d sighed answered. ‘Nein, nein. Alles klar. Es giht ein totes Pferd.’

Katya trembled inside her frozen flesh. This was not the voice of either of the guards. This man was older.

The set of boots on the other side of Katya’s death pose made a nauseated sound, ‘Pfew.’ In Russian, the voice whispered, ‘Leave her.’

The old one murmured, ‘No. We can carry her.’

‘She stinks.’

Katya’s fear did not release easily. She recognized these voices, but cracked her eyes slowly, just enough to peer out under her lashes, to stay dead.

She saw boots. Russian boots. And there were jackets and dark civilian shirts, and yes! Filip, and nasty Josef. They’d come!

Katya gulped a deep breath and fought to sit up.

The two leaped away from her, old Filip staggered backward and fell to his knees, crossing himself and muttering to Christ. Josef recovered first, he stepped to her and without a word dug his hands under Anna’s spine to raise the horse off her.

‘Come on, old man,’ he growled at the starosta.

‘Witch?’ old Filip mumbled, still on his knees.

Katya turned to Filip, knowing how ghastly she must look. ‘Filip, help me get up.’

Josef grunted again, ‘Old man.’

Filip helped Josef heft the horse from Katya’s legs. Katya plucked the dangling intestine from her ripped shirt and tossed it aside, callous now for Anna’s death, her sorrow dismissed by the thrill of reprieve. She sucked down air and thought it sweet, blessed it, felt the honey of her own blood rush back into her feet, then reached up for Josef’s hand to stand on her own. Only minutes had passed since the C-3 exploded, that was all, and she had lived a lifetime in them, and a death. She wanted to hug both men, even Josef.

The two left her wobbling while they went to the tracks to collect the German guards. The blown rail was curled in the air like a beckoning steel finger. Josef and Filip hoisted one man to his feet, he’d been unconscious until Josef kicked him to wake him. The soldier’s hands had been tied and his mouth stuffed with a sock. In the moonlight Katya saw the shock on his face, his pupils wide and white at her standing before him, a blood-covered zombie partisan. The other guard did not rise. His throat was slit. The gash was gaping enough in his neck for Katya to see it from where she stood, blood had poured and pooled in the crannies of the gravel and across rail ties. Katya felt nothing at the sight.

Josef held his knife to the bound German’s throat and gripped him under the elbow. He led the soldier away into the hundred open meters between them and cover. The prisoner walked off with his eyes fixed on Katya.

‘Sei still,’ Filip hissed to him, and drew a index finger under his own chin to make sure the German understood that Josef would kill him if he made a sound.

Filip took Katya under the arm. Together they hurried away behind Josef and the prisoner back to the trees.

‘Where are the horses?’ she asked.

‘Ivan and Daniel got them. They’re waiting. You had a close call, Witch. You scared me so bad I almost filled my britches. Well done. Are you alright?’

She ached down to her marrow, not just from the fall of her horse but from the tempest of fear in her veins; it had withdrawn, but not without leaving its mark in her.

‘Yes.’

Limping across the dark ground on Filip’s arm, she prepared herself for her return to life, to the war and Plokhoi’s partisans, this long night and tomorrow’s day, and her place in it all. Why did the C-3 go off before she was clear? Where was Leonid? Who was the traitor?

How does old Filip know German?

She asked him.

He answered out of breath, lugging her across the open ground. They were almost to the shrubs. Katya spotted the outlines of Ivan and Daniel saddling the remaining horses.

‘My mother was a Sudeten Slav,’ the old man replied. ‘My six brothers and I grew up speaking German.’

‘Did all your brothers come with you to Plokhoi?’

‘Yes.’ The starosta hesitated. ‘All but one.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He stayed in the village. He’s… he’s not welcome.’

Katya slowed, even before reaching the safety of the copse and the other partisans.

‘Why, Filip?’

The starosta’s whisper vented through tight lips, baring shame. ‘Nikolai works for the Nazis. He’s an interpreter. For their interrogations. One day the village… No, my brothers and I, we’ll put a stop to it.’

Katya tugged Filip to a halt. This was a calamity in the old man’s family, a collaborator. She saw shame on Filip’s face, but could not pause for it. She needed to ask something fast, outside the hearing of the others. Of all the partisans, she knew Filip was not the spy.

‘Did he ever question downed Soviet pilots?’

Filip cocked his weathered head at this. ‘Yes. Why?’

A prayer raced through Katya’s heart. ‘Did Nikolai ever travel to Tomarovka?’

‘Last week. They came and took him to Kazatskoe, three kilometers away’

Her heart cartwheeled at this news. Before she could explain, Daniel and Ivan tramped out of the bushes to them. Katya whispered to Filip, ‘Please, don’t tell anybody about this. Talk to me alone. Filip, please.’

‘Yes,’ the starosta beamed, glad at her urgency, he was needed for a secret with the Witch, the bloody partisan woman come back from the dead, ‘of course.’

Daniel and Ivan recoiled when they came close. Daniel gaped at the sight of her. Big Ivan was uncowed, he gathered Katya in his arms.

‘It was Daniel,’ Ivan bent low to her ear, ‘he said it was alright to blow it. I swear.’

‘I heard your horse take off, Witch,’ Daniel said. ‘I didn’t know you were still close to the tracks. The Germans were headed your way. I’m sorry’

‘Shut up,’ Josef barked, with no interest in whispering. ‘Saddle up. Daniel, you ride with the prisoner. Up.’

Daniel made a helpless gesture at Katya, then grabbed the German soldier by the wrists and shoved him onto a horse. Ivan whined, ‘I told him to wait. But the guards got so close. Witch, are you alright?’

Katya moved beside an open saddle. The blood on her face and hands was drying to a rusty cake. She was a resurrection and a fright for the partisans, even Josef winced looking at her. With ease, without pain, she toed the stirrup, rose from the earth, and spurred the new horse away.

July 8 0450 hours SS Leibstandarte situation room Belgorod

With every telegram he handled, the partisan’s heart pumped in Luis’s hand. He took the pieces of paper, some yellow, some blue for urgent, and walked them to the map. The battle was a game, fleshless and compact. It was a slow-moving tide, black German markers inching toward the red sandcastles of the Soviet defenders. Luis did not let himself begin to hate what he was doing, presiding over numbers and stratagems, sliding blocks with shuffleboard sticks, breathing tobacco smoke and not the fumes of gunpowder and gasoline. Hatred was a commodity he would not waste on this map room and these clean liverymen of staff around him. He’d nibbled morsels throughout the first and second days of the battle, he’d slept no more than an hour at a time, sometimes on his feet leaning against a wall. He never unbuttoned his collar. He hoarded his hatred, refusing to squander it on wooden armies. The throb in his knife hand reminded him of actions far beyond a paper field and a toy war.

Luis was naive on his first morning beside the map, the opening day of the battle. He did not understand how the black German blocks of Papa Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army could fail to push through the Red ones. The black had everything: air support, momentum, powerful new weapons, expert and experienced leaders at every level. Luis wanted to simply reach down to the map, sweep his arm through the red bits and push them aside, that was what Hoth was certain to do on the battlefield, what was so difficult? Those were Russian blocks, they were the ones that always were defeated, Verdad? But by the end of the first day, he’d read out eight separate messages from the 48th Panzer Corps, fighting on a fifteen-mile front alongside the Oboyan road, to the left of II SS Panzer Corps. The 48th was trying to keep up with the spectacular northward sweep of the three SS panzer divisions; Totenkopf, Das Reich, and Leibstandarte had fought their way thirty-five kilometers from their jump-off positions, north past Smogodino and Luchki, through the Soviet 6th Army’s second defense belt. The 48th’s job was to protect the SS left flank by crossing the Luchanino River and taking Syrtsev and Alekseyevka, then reach the Psel River by nightfall. Eight times Luis watched the black blocks of the 48th charge across the green line of the Luchanino at the little red battalion blocks of the 3rd Mechanized Corps. Eight times, he hid his growing astonishment when the attacks had been repulsed, the red blocks had held, the road to Oboyan remained in Russian control. The reports spoke of flamethrowers and dug-in T-34 positions, of deep echelons of unyielding defenders and close-quarters combat, of dozens of Tigers and Panthers destroying opposing Russian tanks by a score of seven to one throughout the day. Hundreds of Red tanks were wrecked on an afternoon in just one part of the greater battle, and still those Russian blocks held.

On the right-hand side of the SS advance, battle group Kempf was also lagging, staggering far to the south, running behind every schedule and plan. Totenkopf, Das Reich, and Leibstandarte were outpacing their mates, exposing their vulnerable flanks left and right, like a spear stabbing alone through the Russian defenses. Major Grimm could find nowhere to bang his fist, the game board would have been upset, so he pounded the walls. Breit showed no emotion, only a keen raptor’s eye for information. The entire first day and into the evening, Luis read the messages in a calm voice, supervised the long sticks, and kept his own counsel, absorbing the others’ anger and frustration to feed his own.

On the northern shoulder of the bulge, Colonel General Walter Model achieved nothing to match the penetration into the Soviet defenses by the SS divisions in the south. The lines on Luis’s map in the northern salient resembled more a sag, like a wet ceiling. First, Model was bogged in the town of Ponyri, a blazing battle of tanks and infantry, then he’d been stymied outside the town of Ol’khovalka right at the tip of his advance. The movement of Model’s 11th Army across the big map was globular and slow, not the lightning flash of Blitzkrieg at all. Luis gazed over the little blots of red that held back the unprecedented might of Germany. The reports streaming in to the situation room told the story in bald detail. Model was safeguarding his tanks, keeping them away from the points of attack, using infantry instead to punch through Russian lines, exploiting with his tanks only when there was an opening.

This was not working and could not work – Luis realized this first, hours before Grimm began to bleat about it – not against the immense depths of the Russian defense belts. Infantry on foot were getting chewed up in those thousands of miles of trenches and millions of mines. Tanks, he thought without speaking, watching every flow and recoil of the black blocks in the north. Look at what the SS has done there in the south, look at the pace and ferocity of the assault. The SS uses the bludgeon of the tanks: Mark IVs in the lead in wedge formation, Tigers in the center, this is the Panzerkeil, the armored battering ram. Infantry follows closely, neutralizing the trenches, swarming into the breaches cut by the tanks, holding the gains while the tanks move on. That’s how you cut the Soviets to pieces, that’s how you smash those red blocks into splinters. Tanks, he thought, and the SS. And hatred.

On the second and third days of Citadel, the tendencies set out on the map in the first morning of the German attack played themselves into themes. In the north, Model had advanced his 11th Army no more than fifteen kilometers, then ground to a stop after sacrificing fifty thousand men and four hundred tanks. By the morning of July 8, any possibility of reaching Kursk lay only in the south, with Papa Hoth and his 4th Panzer. But on Papa’s right, Kempf continued to drag behind. The three SS divisions at the vanguard of the assault turned increasingly to the northeast, toward Prokhorovka and away from Kursk, to face the Soviets hacking away at their flanks. Totenkopf was ordered to fall back, given the task of protecting the right flank where Kempf’s army should have been, thus subtracting one SS division from the crest of the advance. On the SS left flank, the 48th Panzer Corps finally broke across the Luchanino River, made progress along the Oboyan road, and linked up with Leibstandarte and Das Reich. But slowly they, too, began to face difficulties. Over the hours it became clear that they could not keep up with the hard-driving SS. Germany’s elite SS Panzer Divisions became more exposed with each kilometer they took. Every incident, attack and counterattack, advance and retreat, all the high ground gained and lost, casualty counts, tank and field-gun losses, repairs, air assaults, every meter of battleground wrested from the Russians by the dying flowed through Luis’s thin touch. He stood by the sprawling map watching the developing carnage and defeat for Germany. Through three short nights and long hot days, all of it vicious for the mounting cost, he handled every message with increasing dread, not only for the miserable news the pages brought to the map but afraid the next sheet would announce the American invasion in Italy, and that would toll the bell on his chance to enter the battle; his second time in Russia would end as fruitlessly as did his first, without a wound this time but also without honor. Luis was helpless, and this was a silent misery for him because he felt strong, growing in power even while Germany struggled, even sleepless as he was, the beat in his hand nudging him, to do what? He was forced to stand by and watch the bull be butchered, knowing if he could only run into the arena he could achieve something, save something, perhaps the day, perhaps Germany, certainly his dream of glory. The map of war was not war, and he knew God did not have a map in mind when He brought Luis back to Russia.

At dawn of the fourth morning beside the teetering chart, Luis took in the message that unleashed him.

Erich Thoma lay in a Belgorod hospital, a bullet through his neck. The note was written by Thoma himself, asking Luis to come.

Luis did not relay this information to the two intelligence officers grinding their teeth beside the map. Major Grimm was a mess, untucked and occasionally forced to leave the map room just to mop his anxiety and restore his uniform to some military decorum. Slipping the location of the hospital into his pocket, Luis approached Major Grimm.

‘Major.’

The heavy man raised his gaze to Luis; eyes and cheeks and chin were swollen as though Grimm were a sponge and all the failure on the map was soaked into him, to seep out his pores in the Russian summer. Luis felt like an icicle beside this bloat.

‘Captain.’

‘I would like an hour, sir. May I be excused?’

‘No!’ the major snapped. He shot a hand at the map. ‘Look. Look for yourself, Captain de Vega. Where is there an hour for you to take?’

‘Go.’

Colonel Breit spoke from across the room, behind his cigarette, a dispassionate voice drilled through the tobacco cloud above the map. ‘He’s been here more than both of us combined, Major. He wants an hour to breathe some air not spoiled by the two of us. Go, Captain. Nothing will get much better or worse in an hour.’

Major Grimm nodded in apology to Luis, overruled. ‘I’m sorry, Captain. Of course, take an hour. Take a walk. I can read bad news as well as you can, I’m sure.’

Luis spun on his boot heels, and left the building. Outside, the slanted sun whitened his skin in the first daylight to hit him for four days. The time was only 0500 but high overhead planes streaked every direction, the cobblestoned street in front of him was clogged with armored vehicles clanking past, ambulances sputtered by, a frenzy of noise and motion assaulted him outside the tense cocoon of the situation room. He stopped only for a moment to take it all in, to absorb this, the senses of real battle, the way Grimm had sopped up the disasters of the map, then moved on, blade lean and ready.

He caught a ride to the hospital in a careening, beeping staff car. When he told the driver he wanted a lift to the hospital, the soldier thought it was because Luis himself needed care, he looked so bad. He asked if Luis was alright, and was told in a curt voice to drive. The man took off.

At the hospital, Luis picked his way through hallways jammed with squealing gurneys and the hurly-burly of medical heroics. This was the place where the road split for a thousand soldiers this day, onward to life or curving away to death, and Luis was unimpressed, he’d crossed this way a year ago and ended up where no man was supposed to go, in the middle, off the road. He dodged surgeries in the hall, blood on the linoleum; doctors and nurses shouted and scurried like the walls were trenches and death was the enemy pouring over the ramparts down on them. Luis neither admired nor respected any of the wounds in the hall; none, not even the fatal ones, were as bad as his. He kept himself erect, disdainful even, when he looked into the scared eyes of the soldiers on the tables, slumped in corners, bleeding in chairs.

He searched for half an hour – the hospital buzzed, a hive of moaning – until a harried nurse led him to Thoma. The man lay in his tailored black SS uniform, on a sheetless bed in a corner of what once was the cafeteria. There were no food smells here, just the clean odor of gauze and the brown smells of soldiers and the dirt they’d fought in. Thoma lay with his hands arranged beside his hips, composed. A collar of bandage swathed his neck, marred only by a red coin of blood below the ear. Thoma was dead.

Luis stood beside the bed.

‘Sniper.’ A grenadier in another cot sat up, his leg was wrapped in a log of gauze. A sniper got him. I heard him say it. A little while ago.’

Luis did not acknowledge the soldier except to pivot his head to the man, then turn away, back to Thoma. Yes, that would be Erich. He would be standing in the turret during the attack, bravado, charmed. Luis lay his hand over the still fingers. Thoma had gone whiter than Luis. He was no longer the man Luis might have become; they’d switched roles. Thoma was now the pale thing.

That’s why Thoma sent word for Luis to come. To make the exchange, to give his blessing.

Luis lifted his hand from cool Thoma. The Iron Cross at Thoma’s throat was not covered by the bandage. The soldier in the other bed had continued jabbering, about the combat, about Thoma perhaps and his exploits, that he might have been a hero. Luis walked off, past the yapping soldier’s bed without exchanging another look. The man gabbled as Luis cut past.

He left the hospital, purposefully. The faster he walked, the more he gained the sense of shedding the failures of the wounded there, the boundaries of the dead, he was alive and hungry and hailing a car. One stopped for him and he got in the back seat, slamming the door with a sound that only the halest of men can make. He rode through frightened Belgorod. The scales of the battle were not tipped just yet, there was still time for Luis Ruiz de Vega to add his weight. Yes, he thought, my weight.

He entered the situation room. The morning was an hour older and nothing had changed, there were no bodies scattered about the carpet, just wooden blocks prodded back or forth. They ought to move this map to the hospital, Luis thought, that’s what Grimm and Breit should have as their backdrop. He walked to Colonel Breit.

‘Sir.’

‘Yes, Captain. Refreshed, I hope.’ The officer’s voice was bland, without sentiment. He’s draining, Luis realized. In a day or two he’ll be as white as Thoma.

‘Sir, Captain Erich Thoma is dead.’

Breit reacted with a bland face. He nodded and reached for his cigarette pack. Major Grimm muttered a curse and set both palms flat on the board to resume his gaze at the pieces. Thoma was nowhere in this room, he was off the board, and the board was all that mattered. Luis reproached himself for tolerating this for the four days he already had.

‘Sir.’

Breit had turned from Luis, expecting the captain to go collect his dispatches and get about his work, stoking the map.

‘Sir.’

‘Yes, Captain?’

‘I request permission to take over Captain Thoma’s command.’

Breit kept his eyes fixed on Luis for several moments, long enough to tug a cigarette from the little carton, pulling his eyes away only to match his lighter flame to the tip. He sucked deep lungs of smoke, eyes on Luis, then peered through the gray, long exhale. The partisan’s heart pulsed in Luis’s hand. He wanted to hold it out to Breit, have him feel the beat for himself. He’d know then.

On the far side of the map, Major Grimm said nothing. He was a protruding and indulgent man, Luis did not want him to speak, not even on his behalf. Breit was a colonel in the SS. Luis stood in front of this officer wearing the same black uniform, the one Thoma wore, the one worn by the only men defeating the Russians on that map.

Breit spoke.

‘How long since you’ve been in combat, Captain?’

Look at me, Luis wanted to shout. I’m in combat every fucking day Instead, he kept the gush of temper out of his face and voice.

‘Almost a year, sir. Before that, I had five years’ service in the armored divisions of Generalissimo Franco and Adolf Hitler.’

Breit dragged again on the cigarette. The corners of the colonel’s mouth flicked. ‘What do you know about the Tiger tank?’

‘I know, sir, that if we win this battle, it will not be because of German weapons but because of the hands they’ve been put into. And I know that we need to reach Kursk as soon as possible.’

‘Yes,’ Breit said, billowing smoke with the words, ‘the Americans are coming.’

‘Yes, sir. The Americans.’

Breit glanced back at Grimm, who echoed his nod.

‘La Daga, hmmm?’

The name of the pickpocket, and the banderillero, and the tank commander. A hero’s name.

‘Go,’ Breit said.

July 8 0710 hours the Oboyan road

Luis rode alone in the bed of a troop carrier on the Oboyan road. He’d hitched a ride in a convoy headed to Luchki to deliver fuel to Leibstandarte and fetch back the wounded. The road itself had weathered the battle well, it was not too torn up by tracked vehicles or bombs. But the land east and west of the highway had been scourged into a vista of destruction. There was hardly anywhere Luis could look that did not display man’s ability to blacken.

Luchki lay fifty kilometers north of Belgorod. In the two hours he spent bouncing on a bench in the back of the four-ton truck, Luis saw a thousand charred vehicles: tanks, self-propelled artillery, personnel carriers, supply trucks like the one he rode in now, ambulances – there was no preference of army, both iron crosses and red stars alike blistered on their burned aprons. The ground had been torn up by mine blasts and cannons, creviced with abandoned trench works, and charred under the gusts of flamethrowers. Unattached wheels and spent shell casings were common on the ground, so were the dead, every human or mechanical bit of them seared murky by the heat of the fighting. The battlegrounds bumped past and Luis was surprised at how the natural colors and contours of the earth had been sooted over, as though the black German blocks of the big map were actually here pressing their shade into the world. He rode amazed at how even the immense steppe sky could absorb so much of man’s stain that it lost its own blue; it was blotched by the streaks of fighters and bombers, smoke from ruined villages and smoldering fields, flak burst in its deepest reaches. He recalled Breit’s cigarette cloud over the map and thought, Yes, that’s here, too. Calm hovered here in the aftermath of the fighting, but it was uglier than any battle, a scorched peace. Luis held on to the truck’s panels, eager to rejoin his division, where the battle took place and everything was not already settled.

In Luchki, he dismounted the truck. The Soviet farming commune was unrecognizable as having ever held the roofs and beds of people. It was a junkyard now, a vignette of the power that frothed when the two battling armies met on the field. Three silos lay on their sides, crumpled, riddled tubes. Fences and sheds, porches and painted windowsIIIs, were strewn flat in a jumble and crushed, nothing of the village stood higher than a hitching post. Luis smelled the battle perfume of petrol and gunsmoke splashed over the smashed slats that had been homes and barns.

Luchki was in the rear of Leibstandarte, in the shaft of the salient thrust like a pike into the Russian defenses by the SS divisions. The front lines were only eight kilometers away on three sides, surrounding all but the south where Luis had come from. Rumbles stomped back to Luchki from these fronts but the early morning had not yet erupted. Luchki filled with supplies of fuel and medicine for Leibstandarte. A battlefield armor repair station was set up next to an aid tent. Luis made himself known to a passing lieutenant. The subaltern directed Luis to the repair area.

Luis walked past men of every mint, clusters of fresh-faced replacement grenadiers just trucked up from the rear, filthy SS fighters slumped around their weapons. Outside the stuffed aid station were men cut in pieces, sometimes in half, groaning on stretchers. Soldiers in undershirts, white-skinned Aryans of long muscle and bone, formed bucket brigades behind the convoy to off-load supplies; officers in still shiny boots spoke in gaggles about what they’d survived out there on the battlefields. Luis overheard one of the officers curse Kempf for not protecting their eastern flank. Another wondered how the campaign in the north was going. Luis walked among them, knowing none of these men and everything about the dispositions of the battlefields around Kursk, not just Kempf but Hoth and Model and von Manstein’s progresses and failures. He was freed from the map room at last, but had not yet shed the knowledge of the map, the vast perspective, like a god sent down among mortals.

He approached the repair area, arranged beneath a hasty camouflage tent. Several tanks were under repair here, two dozen mechanics ministered to them, banging and yanking, clanking the blocks and tackles of mobile tripods to hoist heavy parts. In the center of the shop, four mechanics in rolled sleeves leaned on the fat handle of a jack to raise the immense side of the only Tiger tank under the tent. Luis walked close. He was astonished again at the size of the Tiger, while the four stout mechanics labored over the jack to raise the left-hand tread a few centimeters. One of the twelve interwoven bogie-wheels on this side had taken an antitank round. The mammoth Mark VI must have limped into Luchki to have it replaced. But the Tiger had to be lifted first; these mechanics heaved together, counting ‘Eins, zwei, drei…’

Luis walked around the Tiger, counting in its thick armor the scoops and punches from Soviet shells. The tank had weathered an excruciating number of hits. The whole exterior had been covered with zimmerit, an anti-magnetic paste made from sawdust that dried like concrete, to keep the Red infantry from attaching magnetic mines to the chassis once the giant tank broke through their lines. He read the markings painted on the Tiger: on the left glacis plate beside the machine-gunner’s portal was a horizontal bar topped with two vertical bars, the special signet designed by the SS to denote the battle of Kursk; on the turret was painted the vehicle code, S21. The ‘S’ signified a heavy panzer, the numbers denoted it as part of the second platoon, the first tank out of four. Luis thought this might be one of the Tigers he delivered to Thoma last week. He recalled the sight of the huge machines on their flatbeds, they’d been new and awesome, bearing the promise of victory. Now, to look at this Tiger after only four days in battle, it seemed to bear the scourges of a thousand guns.

When the mechanics had struggled enough with the jack, two of them stepped off to dab their brows while the two others wrestled with the bolts on the hub of the damaged wheel to release it. Luis was noticed now. A mechanic crammed his kerchief into his overalls and executed a quick dash over to Luis.

‘Yes, sir, Herr Captain.’

Luis could not break his recent habit of searching the eyes of every new man who looked at him for the first time, to ferret out what that man thought of the chalky apparition, the Spanish SS officer in front of him. This mechanic did not react to Luis’s gauntness. Good, Luis thought, excellent. The soldiers up here at the front are different from the cows in the rear. They don’t flinch.

‘I am Captain Luis de Vega. I’m taking over Captain Thoma’s company in the 1st Panzer Regiment.’

The mechanic nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

Luis paused, to let the mechanic instruct him further, where to go, where the other Tigers of Leibstandarte were. The man said nothing.

Luis asked coolly, ‘Where is Captain Thoma’s regiment?’

‘They’re just south of Sukho-Solotino.’ The man turned to point northeast. ‘It’s about…’

‘I know where Sukho-Solotino is,’ Luis said. The mechanic lowered his arm and set his jaw. Luis did not care to mollify his tone. ‘This is one of Captain Thoma’s Tigers, isn’t it?’

The mechanic shrugged. ‘Yes, sir, you might say that.’

Luis saw insolence and was about to correct it, when another voice came through the hammering in the tent.

‘This was Captain Thoma’s Tiger.’

Four men advanced through the loose parts on the ground and the other noisy repair crews. They came dressed in Waffen SS blacks under cloth caps, slim and purposeful young men, walking abreast. Their strides as much as their insignia identified them. Leibstandarte tankers.

They stopped in front of Luis. All four presented the Hitler salute, that outlandish thrust of the arm. Luis returned the salute and felt asinine, the five of them forming an arbor of upraised hands. He lowered his hand first, the others followed suit. The tallest of them stepped forward. He appeared to be the oldest of the four, as well, perhaps twenty-two.

‘Sir. I am Sergeant Balthasar. We were Captain Thoma’s crew. Are you the new company commander, sir?’

These boys were stolid, Nazi dogs of war. Luis did not bother to scrutinize their reactions to him. Every chin jutted above the SS runes at the collar. These German lads knew their place well enough for Luis to have no need to put them in it. Yes, Luis thought, these fellows are of the right makings. Steel-eyed, puffed chests, godless hearts, each one of them was as deadly as a bullet, and Luis was now in charge, the one to aim and fire them. He was back in command.

‘Si,’ he spoke in Spanish deliberately, to announce to his new crew that he was different, he was exotic, he was not Thoma nor did he care to be. Thoma was dead.

‘Ja,’ he corrected himself in German. ‘Captain de Vega.’

Luis added nothing more for a moment, a little test for the four crewmen. Who would speak if not spoken to, who would scrape his feet with impatience? He cast his eyes up and down their line, their mouths stayed shut and awaiting, and he was again satisfied. Thoma had whipped them well. Luis mounted a cruel sneer for them and nodded, his first performance of leadership; the boys surely saw him as a bizarre-looking, extraordinary man. He let them have a first glance at the new power he brought to them, and to this scarred, apparently indomitable Tiger they controlled.

The next step was to show them his physical vitality; though he was reed thin he was still nimble and strong. He turned from the crew and swung himself up on the tilted chassis, leaping easily from the ground onto the fender, then climbed up to the turret.

There was an element of swagger in his swift motion, the crew were all young men, he drew hints of smiles. He started to step down into the commander’s open hatch, to lower himself into the Tiger, to give the appearance of inspecting it, leaving the four to wait on him until he popped back up. Luis had never sat in the commander’s seat of a Tiger. He would not tell the crew that, or describe the thrill spreading into his hands and ruined stomach. The tank was a brute – the crew were brutes, too – and they were all his. Outside this clanging repair tent rang the battle and the war and his redemption.

The Tiger reached up to embrace him with an oily, dark aroma. The jagged, close quarters welcomed him. In the padded seat of the commander, more than anywhere else in the world, Luis was not wounded, he was not ugly or woeful. He felt his lost wholeness returning.

He reached up to close the hatch door, to enclose himself in the Tiger and imagine what lay ahead in the warming morning. Above his hand, something was splattered in the workings of the round raised door.

Thoma’s blood.

Luis did not hesitate. Thoma was off the board. He wrapped his fist around the smirched handle and pulled the heavy door down. He’ll take Thoma’s blood back into battle for him, gain some measure of revenge for the man. This felt right. Luis sat alone inside the Tiger, with the mechanics pounding at its side.

As he expected, the Tiger was far roomier than the last tank he’d sat in, the Mark IV His commander’s seat was secured above the massive breech of the main gun. He set his feet on the turntable and could almost stand erect. Inside the cupola, his head was ringed by five thick glass vision blocks, each with a padded browrest. He leaned into them one at a time and peered into the tent, forward, to the sides, and back. There was his crew, in their tight little chorus line, still black-clad and disciplined. This added to his delight.

Below Luis’s feet were two more chairs. Directly in front and to the left was the gunner’s position, with all its firing controls and sighting and aiming systems. This was one of the great advantages of the Tiger, for German optics were the finest in the world. The gunner was expected to hit a stationary target inside twelve hundred meters with his first round, at two thousand meters with his fourth round, and a moving target under twelve hundred meters with his third round, each shell aimed and fired within thirty seconds. The gunner had at his disposal a hydraulic turret traverse and a handwheel for the final few degrees of accuracy. The commander’s position had only a manual traverse flywheel in case the hydraulics failed, but no access to the power traverse control. The designers made it plain that operating the cannon was the gunner’s job.

Below the gunner sat the driver. Luis craned himself lower to see into the driver’s position. The main features there were the steering wheel and poor visibility. The driver was only allowed to see the outside world through a narrow glass block visor and a periscope. No provision had been made for him to drive with his head out of the chassis. At the driver’s feet were conventional pedals for brake and clutch. To the right, across the bulk of the transmission and a shelf for the tank’s radio, was the position for the bow gunner/radioman. The bow gunner had a 7.92 mm machine-gun and a telescope firing sight. The odd thing here was a metal headpan, an upside-down cup at the end of a rod designed to rest on the bow gunner’s skull, so that he moved the direction of the muzzle with his head. When the bow gunner was not firing, the radio to his left was his priority.

Luis straightened his back and sat up in his commander’s seat. Beside him, on the right-hand side of the big breech, was the loader’s position. This chair faced the rear of the turret. The loader had the most room of any of the five-man crew, with superb access to the many rounds of the tank’s ammunition. The shells were mounted on horizontal wall racks in the compartment, five dozen rounds within easy reach. There would be more in bins beneath the floor. The rounds were huge, the sharp teeth of this Tiger, bigger than anything the Russians could hurl back at him. Luis tried to take one in his arms and almost dropped it out of the rack. He put it back gingerly, a little embarrassed, he’d almost fumbled it and let the crew hear him knocking around inside their tank. It appeared the Tiger had been reloaded, with a full complement of rounds divided equally between AP and high-explosive.

He leaned into the forward vision block, to stare along the magnificent length of the 88 mm gun. He relaxed in his chair, just for one more private minute, and breathed in the cave of the Tiger’s innards. He liked the arrangement in here; unlike the Mark III and the Russian T-34 where the commanders were also gunners, every crewman in the Tiger – like the older Mark IVs, with a five-man crew – had a well-defined task. The radio, all guns, the driving, each had its station. The commander had only to command. Luis, even without experience in a Mark VI, knew he could do that. He’d led tanks in battle many times. Command was his nature, and as soon as the mechanics repaired the wheel, it would be a nature unbound. He’d never had this kind of force at his fingertips – not in another tank, not in the corrida holding his banderillas over his head, not even in his fast knife hand. He caressed the Tiger’s thick hide from the inside, where he and his men would be the Tiger’s courage and anger. The partisan’s heartbeat still throbbed in his hand, but different now, encased in steel.

He drew a deep breath and put his hand to the bloody hatch cover. He shoved Thoma out of the way and stood in the commander’s cupola. The four crewmen below had not moved. He glanced down at the mechanics, they’d gotten off the bad wheel. The Tiger would be rolling inside the hour.

Luis climbed down and stood in front of Sergeant Balthasar.

‘I’m sorry about Captain Thoma. I knew him only a little. But he must have been a fine commander to bring you through like this.’

Luis expected this sentiment would dispose of Thoma and finalize his taking of the Tiger and crew. Balthasar said, ‘Yes, sir.’ The others made memorial faces. Luis changed his tone.

‘Now, Sergeant. We’ll leave for Sukho-Solotino as soon as possible. Which is the driver?’

‘I am, sir.’

A teenager with a big gap in his front teeth spoke, a corporal. He lisped his name and Luis did not remember it a second after it was said.

‘Make certain she’s properly fueled. Any problems with the transmission, the engine, anything the mechanics should look at while we’re here?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I’ll rely on that.’ Luis dripped a hint of threat into this remark. ‘Radioman?’

Another of the four straightened. Luis asked again if all was well. He repeated this query with the loader, Are we fully armed, machine-guns and main battery? Luis listened to perfunctory replies, marking each man in his head by role and not by name or rank. Driver. Loader. Gunner. Radio. There was no need for them to be men. They were tasks.

‘Gunner,’ he said to Balthasar. ‘Walk with me.’

Luis led the young man away from the tent. The sun climbed in the morning but it was not yet even eight o’clock. Luis spoke.

‘The crew,’ Luis said. ‘Tell me right now anything I need to know.’

‘They’re the best, Captain. Every one of them.’

‘Again, I’ll rely on that.’ Again the threat on the pallid lips. ‘You understand.’

The sergeant took this in. Luis saw and savored the impact.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The rest of the regiment is in Sukho-Solotino. What’s the condition of the other tanks?’

‘We’re down to thirty-one Mark IIIs, thirteen Mark IVs, and seven T-34s.’

‘What about the other Tigers?’

The sergeant hesitated.

‘You don’t know, sir?’

Luis was aware only of what the map and messages had told him, the progress and location of wooden block armies.

‘Know what?’

‘We’re the last Tiger.’

‘In the company?’

‘No, sir.’

The gunner drew himself up, like a schoolboy ready for punishment. ‘In the division.’

Luis went stock-still, to keep from the gunner how this rocked him. He was about to join an armored division that four days ago had thirteen Tigers. Seconds stretched out while he stared at the sergeant. The wreckage of a dozen Mark Vis, invincible machines, would not play out in his head. Something was wrong. Luis couldn’t believe it was the Tigers themselves but the hands that guided them, into minefields, into ambushes, into indefensible positions. Yes, the Tigers were slow, and certainly there were mechanical problems cropping up here and there. But to lose all but one to the Russians in four days? No. Luis could not blame the machines.

He looked back across the littered and busy ground to the repair tent, recalling the beating that brave tank had taken, the last Tiger in Leibstandarte. He had only that one left, to put into battle at the head of Mark IIIs and IVs and captured Soviet tanks. He brought his eyes around to the gunner, who’d helped keep this one giant tank alive for him to command.

‘Good,’ he said.

July 8 0830 hours Luchki

Luis was not in the tent when the mechanics lowered the Tiger. A lieutenant from Leibstandarte, alerted by Major Grimm, came to greet him with orders. He was instructed to proceed in his Tiger immediately northwest to Sukho-Solotino. Leibstandarte was assigned along with Totenkopf to reorient away from the northeast, to mount an attack in the direction of the Oboyan road, then plunge directly at Kursk. The third SS division, Das Reich, was to hold down the right flank instead of Army Group Kempf, which had barely gotten out of the gate east of Belgorod and was continuing to lag. Receiving his orders, Luis cast his thoughts back to the map room, to fat Grimm and chain-smoking Breit pacing beside the board. He saw the map and how these orders made sense. He thanked the lieutenant and jogged back to the repair tent, excited now, envisioning the long sticks pushing Leibstandarte into position at Sukho-Solotino and then the Oboyan road. One of the black blocks moving against the Red defense line across the road would be his.

Even before he saw it he heard his Tiger’s howling engine in the center of the village, bellowing for him. Beside his tank was a Mark IV that had also been repaired. The Tiger was almost twice the size, its revving engine distinct, the pocks on its surface testaments to the fight in its hide. Men walking past gave the tank a wide berth, like a bull run into the ring belching steam and snot and spoiling for blood. Luis ran to it and climbed the turret to his open hatch. He dropped his legs into the open cupola. The loader handed him his padded helmet, he strapped it on and attached the throat microphone. The Tiger waited, vibrating around him. Luis pulled his goggles down over his eyes, to ride standing like Thoma over the barley and wheat fields, to crush the sunflowers and mustard stalks between him and Sukho-Solotino. He glanced at Thoma’s blood and spoke into the intercom, ‘Driver, forward.’

July 8

0920 hours

8 kilometers south of Sukho-Solotino

The sun was unstinting, a Spanish sun over the fields that would become battlefields this morning. Luis gazed north across a bland expanse of steppe grass and patchy greens where young crops had not yet been stamped on. Ten kilometers to his left, the flat reach was split by the ribbon of the Oboyan road, his objective. In his way was the defended town of Sukho-Solotino. Behind Sukho-Solotino was the last of the three principal Soviet defense lines, the most dangerous and desperate of the Red barriers. Behind those positions, idling on the steppe, was a full-strength Russian reserve army waiting to engage the SS forces now draining themselves in the trenches and minefields on this path to Kursk. Luis’s fight would be here, across this broad and dangerous field, in this tiny piece of the arena.

Below the ridge, two grenadier battalions of Leibstandarte -worn down to a thousand men each – had dug in, turning captured Russian defense works against their creators. A dozen batteries of antitank artillery were leveled at Sukho-Solotino. Sappers crawled through the crop stalks to pull mines out of the ground. Farther out in the grasslands, T-34 hulks smoldered; apparently there had already been a Russian attack at dawn, repulsed.

A soldier flagged Luis down and pointed him into a position in the middle of five other tanks, all Mark IVs. The gunner said in the intercom that this was their command platoon. Luis barked to the driver to bring the Tiger into place, then shut down to save petrol. A sergeant-major climbed up on the deck to salute and welcome him. The man was in his forties, flat-nosed, and badly shaven. Luis could tell he was very glad to have a Tiger back in the regiment, and didn’t give a damn that the man commanding it was a frightful-looking chap and not Erich Thoma.

‘Captain, well done. You got here just in time.’

Luis aimed his chin at the battle detritus in the field, and beyond to Sukho-Solotino. ‘What happened?’

The sergeant-major shrugged, hardened by carnage. ‘Nothing much. They made a halfway charge at us this morning at sunup. We knocked out twenty T-34s with no losses of our own. They ran straight into the infantry, and the antitank guns did the work. The tanks didn’t even leave the hill. You know the Reds. Twenty of their tanks dead, and they got nothing for it. It just winds them up and makes them madder.’

Luis liked that phrase ‘You know the Reds.’ It said to him, Fellow soldier.

‘We figure they’ll hit back anytime now,’ the sergeant-major continued. ‘After we scatter this next attack, we’ll move down and take the town.’ He struck a palm against the Tiger’s turret. ‘Having this big son of a bitch back in the lead will make it go a lot better.’

Luis took a moment to unstrap his soft helmet and pull it off. He ran a bony hand through his hair. ‘This big son of a bitch will not be in the lead, Sergeant-major. Your tank will be.’

The man reared back at this, pulling his face away and wincing, as though Luis had disappeared and another had popped into his place, a coward.

‘Captain, I don’t think…’

‘I didn’t ask what you think, Sergeant-major.’

The man was expected to close his mouth and say no more, but he did not, perhaps, Luis thought, because he was an older fellow and believed he knew best, that is what happens with every year.

‘Captain, if I might. Captain Thoma…’

Luis interrupted again; his voice was that of a man slapping the hand of a reaching child.

‘Captain Thoma commanded an armored company in a regiment that lost thirteen of its fourteen Tigers in four days of fighting. Captain Thoma and others lost those tanks to improper use and unnecessary risk, and was lucky not to have lost this one, as well. Captain Thoma, you will also note, is dead.

‘Sergeant-major, the Tiger tank was not designed to be trotted out in front at the first sign of trouble. It is the ultimate weapon of the panzer unit, and from now on will be used solely in that role in this company. When the assault begins, this platoon will form a Panzerkeil. You and your Mark IV will take the point. I will follow inside the wedge. The three other platoons will form Panzerkeile as well and take up positions to our front and sides. You and the other Mark IVs will protect this Tiger from mines and infantry assaults. When the Soviet tanks appear and the decisive moment in the battle arrives, you will then have a living Tiger beside you and not a dead one. Do you understand?’

The sergeant-major had gone stiff. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘The Tiger was designed with one purpose, Sergeant-major. It was brought to Kursk for that purpose. To meet and defeat the Russian tank on the battlefield. No other target warrants my attention.’

‘Yes, sir, Captain.’

‘Instruct the other platoon leaders that I will see them here in ten minutes.’

The sergeant-major did not approve, Luis knew this from the blank face he mounted while listening. The man said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and clambered off the Tiger. Luis watched him go. The sergeant-major would tell the three other platoon leaders and nudge them into dislike of the new captain, and his tactic, as well. No matter, Luis thought, and not to be unexpected. They’ve had the maverick Thoma and fourteen Tigers charging to the front, taking their hits for them and delivering massive blows to clear the way. In the process Thoma squandered all but this last Tiger, and stopped a bullet for good measure. Luis had no intention of rolling over an undetected mine or losing a tread to a cheap Soviet round in the flank. This last Tiger was a gift: It would not be frittered away while in his hands.

He let his crew lift their hatches. Four of the five positions in the Tiger had their own escape doors, except for the gunner, who had to follow the commander out. A Tiger was expected to be evacuated in under twenty seconds. He slipped a tin of crackers from his pocket and chewed. He could not imagine himself giving that order to evacuate.

The sergeant-major returned with the other platoon leaders, all sergeants. Luis gave them instructions without coming down from his turret. He was not Thoma, he was not going to pat shoulders and cajole. The men returned to their tanks with orders, not encouragement or rationale. Luis watched them walk off. His eye snagged again on the underside of the Tiger’s hatch door, on the brown spatter there. At the first opportunity he’d have Thoma’s blood scraped off. He didn’t like the dead man keeping such a close eye on him anymore. It was not Thoma’s turn any longer. It was his now.

The Russian attack started at 1000 hours. Puffs and flashes rose from the plain in front of Sukho-Solotino. The Red infantry moved up beside their tanks. Luis slipped his headgear back on and snapped his throat microphone in place. He ducked into the hatch.

‘Driver,’ he shouted down, ‘start engine.’

The Tiger’s great Maybach motor roused with a vigor that sent a thrill up his legs. Everything came alive with such power, the hydraulics yowled, the exhaust pipes spit black as though the Tiger were clearing its throat, every metal muscle flexed; standing motionless the thing exuded more strength than any tank Luis had ever seen running at full bore.

‘Radio.’

The answering voice crackled in his headset. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell the platoons to hold fire until my command.’

All the Tiger’s hatches were lowered and secured, except where Luis stood in the turret. He raised his binoculars. Eight kilometers away, the Russian assault began to flow across the fields, met only by the popping of mortar fire and mobile artillery. The sky was clear of fighters and bombers, this morning was to be a pure ground battle. The two Leibstandarte grenadier battalions showed discipline and stayed in their revetments, on the defense for the moment, winnowing the creeping Soviets as best they could. The grenadiers waited for their tank support. Luis held it back.

He counted forty T-34s streaming out of Sukho-Solotino, outnumbering his four tank platoons three to one. The Red tanks barreled over the open ground away from the Oboyan road, outdistancing their own infantry. At that rate they’d be on top of the grenadiers in ten minutes, firing flat trajectories into the trenches, softening the German resistance for the sweep of their following horde. This was the moment when Erich Thoma would have charged down the incline into the melee, for the dramatic rescue, superior enemy numbers be damned, there was style to be considered. Luis shook Thoma off. He waited, gathering in the panorama, the Soviet rush, the line of tanks under his command, the Tiger pulsing beneath his feet, smoke and flame on the plain. He would let the dug-in grenadiers absorb the first blows of the T-34s, have them slow the Soviet charge with antitank fire, perhaps some of the more intrepid soldiers might hop out of their foxholes and board a few Red tanks with magnetic mines and grenades. He liked the power of his denial, of holding back and watching the Soviet tanks close in on the grenadiers, he relished the uneven clash of raw men below against the charging machines and knew the entire panzer company strained for his command to enter the fight. Thoma would have let them go by now, but Thoma was dead, and so were a few grenadiers to make Luis’s point. He licked all this power out of the morning for his hunger, swallowed it like morsels, and tasted the last of his bitter wounded year, it had come to an end. A new time was begun, a new and stronger hunger took over. Abora mismo. Right now.

‘Gunner.’

‘Sir.’

‘Range.’

The turret whirred and swung a few degrees to the right while Balthasar acquired a target.

‘Twenty-eight hundred meters and closing.’

The big gun elevated.

‘Loader.’

The response was immediate. ‘AP round loaded and locked, Captain.’

With the binoculars pressed to his sockets, Luis paused ninety seconds to let the T-34s close in to the killing range of the Tiger.

Balthasar said, ‘Captain.’

‘Yes, gunner, one moment. Distance.’

‘Twenty-one hundred meters.’

‘Patience, Balthasar.’

Luis lowered his binoculars. He liked the dust clouds under the Russian tanks. He smelled the morning, to remember it.

‘Range.’

‘Sixteen hundred meters, Captain.’

‘Fire at lead tank.’

Luis ducked inside the turret just before the cannon erupted. The tank jolted backward. The noise, even through his helmet, was pulverizing. The breech rammed back and ejected a hot casing into the turret basket. The loader moved like lightning, stuffing another shell into the breech almost before the tank could settle, then he shoved the spent casing into an empty bin and hefted another large shell into his arms for the next shot, all this in seconds. Luis did not speak or stand to look into his binoculars to peer through the whipped dust to see if the target was hit. He kept in his seat and watched his crew work.

The gunner twirled the elevation handwheel half a turn, paused with his brow pressed to his optics, then calmly said into the intercom, ‘Away’ Luis braced. The gunner toed the firing pedal. The long gun woofed again, the tank shuddered, a smoking casing spat from the breech, and the loader was there kneeling beside the gun with another cradled shell. The gunner’s voice sparked in Luis’s helmet.

‘T-34 burning, sir.’

Luis shook a fist that the gunner did not see. The crouching loader caught his eye. The young soldier grinned. ‘Keep firing. At will, gunner.’

‘Yes, sir.’

In five minutes the Tiger racked up four more kills at ranges of two thousand to fifteen hundred meters. Luis kept his head down, his eyes fixed in his own vision block. The first three Red tanks had to be bracketed with shells before they were hit, the fourth was a single shot to a T-34 that had hit a mine and ground to a stop. Gunner Balthasar snapped the turret off the Soviet tank like breaking a French bread.

The Russian tanks charged through the spouts of flame and dirt flung up by the Tiger. They had to. At this distance, their 75 mm guns could barely dent the frontal armor of the German tanks aligned on the ridge. Against the Tiger itself, their cannons were useless even at point-blank range unless fired from the side, where the Tiger, like all tanks, was vulnerable. So the Reds gunned forward, relying on numbers and speed to survive until they could get within one kilometer, their lethal range against the Mark IVs. Luis was in no hurry to help them close the gap. He held his tanks at bay on the ridge.

The frontal elements of the Russian attack slowed when they neared the grenadiers’ first defensive positions. The Red tanks had outpaced their infantry by at least a kilometer. The Leibstandarte grenadiers fired antitank guns and small-arms but there were too many T-34s for them to stop. The Russian tanks slammed explosive rounds and machine-gun fire into the scrambling infantrymen. The Tiger’s driver revved his engine, a subtle signal that he considered now to be the time to get going, fly down the hill, and take on the Red tanks. Still Luis waited, to let the ground troops absorb the first brunt of the tank attack. ‘Gunner, lead T-34’ was all he said. The gunner drew a slow and careful bead on a tank in the van of the Soviet assault. The long cannon whined, lowering to a level trajectory, pointing a damning finger at the Russian tank. Luis asked, ‘Range?’ The voice answered, ‘Fifteen hundred meters.’

‘Fire.’

The gunner muttered, ‘Away,’ and blasted the T-34 with a round that Luis heard strike like a blacksmith’s anvil. This was what Luis waited for. The Russians were now in range of the Mark IVs.

‘Radio. Tell the platoons to open fire.’

With a single earsplitting cannonade the fourteen German panzers hammered at the Soviet charge. When the salvo was away, Luis stood in his turret to assess the blow. He had to wait several seconds for the dust and powder smoke to swirl away on the concussive wind. When he could see through the battle haze, he raised his binoculars to a field of black geysers. Smoke poured out of a fourth of the Russian tanks. The odds were better now, two to one.

Luis restrained his Tiger and the Mark IVs on the hill for another minute, to further sap the Soviet attack. In that time his company fired over fifty rounds, destroying another ten T-34s. The Leibstandarte grenadiers were out of their holes now, gaining the flanks on the Soviet tanks. The Russian infantry had not caught up yet, they still ran at least two kilometers behind. It seemed to Luis they were losing their verve for rushing into a battle that had swung against them even before they’d entered it.

The enemy was confused and hurt. There were no trumpets to announce it, but Luis knew the time had arrived to send the banderilleros away. The moment had come for the matador.

‘Driver. Forward.’

The Tiger was not swift but it did not have to be. Its frontal armor was impervious to anything the T-34s could hurl at it, and for the first five hundred meters of their advance down the hill so were the Mark IVs. His tank formation never exceeded ten kilometers an hour, but with every meter they closed, the Red tanks grew larger in his gunners’ optics. Luis buttoned his hatch and trained his eyes on the terrain and the conduct of his company. The Mark IVs lumbered on his sides and in front, moving in wedges the way he’d ordered. He shifted in his seat, glancing left and right through the vision blocks in his cupola, communicating over the radio with the platoon leaders to keep them in formation. At a range of one kilometer from the lead T-34, the fourteen Leibstandarte tanks were a formidable blazing force. The Tiger stood at the center braying the loudest and killing the surest.

Rumbling in his commander’s seat at the heart of the charge. Luis felt quietly exultant. The Tiger paused once a minute for the gunner to aim and fire, then lurched ahead with the pack. Luis had not dreamed of this kind of power at his control, he’d never imagined it from his hospital beds in his white-washed convalescence. How could he? Now, a year later, dust and smoke parted for him. small-arms fire hardly made pings against his rushing armor. Luis selected targets, the gunner blasted them, the radioman issued his orders, the loader fed the breech, the driver jolted the Tiger at his direction. In every angle of his vision, German tanks under his command fired and chased the Russians backward. He held on in the Tiger’s belly and pressed the counterattack.

The Russians were routed. The T-34s were quick, and when they scattered it was impressive. The Soviet tanks were nimble, running wide circles to gain flank angles to the German wedges, or to get away back to Sukho-Solotino to set up a final defense line there. Luis kept his attention on three T-34s coming at him in a zigzag. Three Mark IVs fired at this bold group and missed, or their rounds glanced off the T-34s’ sloped armor. These Soviets had spotted the last Tiger tank and wanted it dead.

Luis gave the order to halt.

The Tiger dug in its claws and ground to a stop. The Russian tanks advanced, cutting left and right. Luis admired their agility. They moved faster than the gunner could traverse, the Tiger’s hydraulics whined but could not keep up. He watched them approach, inside seven hundred, then five hundred meters.

The first of the three T-34s came to a standstill. The Tiger’s gunner swung the turret at the tank, but Luis knew his cannon would not be fleet enough. Head-on, the T-34’s angled design made it a green triangle on treads. In the center of the figure, the enemy’s main gun smoked. Faster than Luis could flinch, the shell struck. He was kicked back from his vision block by the blast, everyone in the Tiger shivered. Paint chips snowed down on him; the shell had smacked the turret directly in front of his position and the thick armor held, another scar for the Tiger. His ears rang from the clout, but not so much that he could not hear the gunner holler, ‘Away!’

The Tiger rocked again, now to its own cannon. Luis did not bother to see if that T-34 was finished, at this range the enemy tank would have filled the gunner’s sights. The loader fed the breech in an instant, the driver kicked the clutch, and the Tiger turned to find and face the remaining two T-34s. When Luis aimed his eyes back outside the Tiger, he found those two T-34s in burning ruins. One Russian crew was bailing out of their tank’s billowing hatches. The Tiger’s driver swung his nose at them so the machine-gunner could finish them with one long burst.

Luis lifted his heavy hatch door. He ignored Thoma’s blood there. He reared up into the late morning, the air greasy now with a black mist from dying machines. On his right and left flanks, the barrels of five Mark IVs steamed. A hundred meters away, the flat-nosed master-sergeant shot him a salute from his own turret. Luis returned the gesture.

Across the fields, the Russian force retreated at full clip. Their assault had been executed badly, piecemeal, tanks without infantry, without air cover. The pageant of this morning was nearly complete. The bull had been prepared, worn down, the matador had danced with it, allowing the horns to pass near, luring the danger close enough for gasps. The muleta had blood swiped on it. Now the matador must lay the cape aside. Time for the sword and the final pass.

Luis gave the order. He did not use the radio to talk to the platoon leaders. They were all in their turrets, looking over at him, some through binoculars. Instead, he raised his white saber of an arm and stabbed it forward at Sukho-Solotino.

July 8 1830 hours SS Leibstandarte situation room Belgorod

The battle flowed through Abram Breit’s hands. Citadel streamed past on flimsy pages, like comic illustrations on a pad: Flip the pages fast and the figures move for you. The reports were carried to him by couriers, men who stalked up out of the outlying reaches of the room beyond the map table. Breit read the sheets – always terse statements that belied the frenzy and rage, the smoke and the dying; field commanders seemed to have an ethic about this, writing only cold words for their plights – and turned them into black or red twitches on the table. Breit gazed at nothing but the reports, the shifting board and blue match flames to light his cigarettes.

In the dim, big room, lit by one bulb swaying low over the map, Breit studied the map as a living canvas. With arms folded, seeping smoke, he watched Citadel take on its shape and colors. He was mesmerized by the paint that was flung onto the table, lives. Break enough lives here, paint it black. Not enough here, paint it red. Hourly he forwarded action reports to SS headquarters. For the generals, Breit separated the battle into its vital measurement: numbers. Every soldier, minute, meter of grass could be caught in a number, a brush stroke of math. His calculations spoke terrible news: After four and a half days of fighting, three hundred Germans were being killed or wounded every hour. For the Russians, the number was six hundred. Every hour, a dozen German tanks were knocked out of action. For the Reds, twice that. Seven German airplanes were shot down. Ten for the Soviets. Every hour, night and day. No one could count the number of artillery rounds fired, or the bullets and bombs it took to make these mounds of bodies and wreckage.

Breit computed a ratio of losses per territory gained. In the north, where Colonel General Model fought, German progress had been stopped. Though the fighting was still vicious, there was no longer any way to break through to Kursk out of the north. The Reds had held there. The casualties per kilometer for Model would be enormous, over twelve hundred men for every one of his fifteen kilometers of penetration into the Soviet lines.

Here in the south, only the three SS divisions had made significant headway. Totenkopf, Das Reich, and Leibstandarte fighting together had blazed almost forty kilometers up the Oboyan road. They’d done this against the stiffest Soviet defenses in the whole Kursk salient. Hourly losses for the SS units averaged less than a dozen men and two tanks. Sometimes with quick repairs the tanks were replaced the same day. Not so for the human casualties. The keepers of the map watched the black blocks of II SS Panzer move north along the road, globular and inexorable like water creeping over the map. Each time another Soviet unit was absorbed or shoved aside by an SS division, the mood in the room flared, little bursts of hope, like heat lightning. Abram Breit smoked and stayed apart while Major Grimm and the others clapped and paced, shouting at the table like fans at a cockfight. Soon more news would enter from other dark chambers, from the radio and code rooms, about other units, their dire struggles and failures against the Reds and the costs they were paying. Then the map room would take another long, slow dunk back into the quiet mire of dismay.

This was Citadel, passing through Breit’s hands.

In a calm moment, he wondered about the Spaniard who had left this morning to replace Thoma. For a while he’d thought perhaps young Captain de Vega with his wounds so visible might have been a Lucy contact, secreted somehow to Kursk to keep in touch with their star spy, Breit. The skinny boy was secretive, as silent as Breit himself. The Spaniard had the false look of a man living two lives, with two faces, two everything. Though de Vega proved not to be from Lucy, he was plainly more than what he appeared, a quiet and hurt boy. Breit glanced down at the black block for Leibstandarte beside the Oboyan road, noting the ten kilometers of road de Vega’s division had already captured that afternoon. Breit feared he may have sent out into the battle a fierce one and given him a Tiger tank.

Standing beside the map, Breit handled another page. He did not look up at the face of the messenger who loomed in and out of the gloom ringing the table. The Spaniard had been the only distinct one, the rest were simply staffers. Breit was one of them, too, lean and scholarly, unscarred by battle. He looked at his own white hands holding this latest page, recalled the remarkably thin hands of the Spaniard, and marveled how different a man can be from his appearance.

Breit scanned the report. He expected it to be like the hundred others handed to him today, another mosaic of news in the battle. He lifted a finger to beckon one of the stick bearers, to have the staffer push some block forward, and another one backward. He lowered his hand. Behind him, boots retreated. Breit read the page again, slowly.

Leibstandarte had taken the town of Sukho-Solotino. Another seven kilometers of the Oboyan road had fallen into German hands.

Breit digested the facts on the page, the casualty count, materiel lost, enemy losses, current status and location of division.

One word occurred over and over in the report. It dawned on Breit that this word had stood at the head of every report of every successful action the Germans had mounted since Citadel began.

Tiger.

In the fighting in the north, out of the six hundred tanks in Model’s 11th Army, none were Mark V Panthers and only thirty-one were Mark VI Tigers. Model had not used his few Mark Vis well, he had not put them into the fight at the right times and places. He’d been too cautious, too impressed with the Tigers to spend them. So Model was kaput.

Of the one hundred Tigers assigned to the southern front of the Kursk bulge, fifty-seven served in the three SS divisions and the Grossdeutschland division of 48th Panzer Corps. Every one of those tanks had been used in the battle for the Oboyan road, in the middle of the most brutal combat in all of Citadel.

The Russian T-34s often ran away from the Tigers when they encountered them. Good thing, too, because no single T-34 could ever hope to best a Mark VI in combat. Even so, the Tigers were being lost at an alarming rate, to mines, to misuse, to asking them to do too much, or too little. Right now there were no more than six Tigers total operating in all three SS divisions. But the behemoths were hard to knock out of the fight for good; at night, German mechanics towed the wounded Tigers off the battlefields and often repaired them by morning. The Tigers were a single-minded priority for the SS’s mobile repair stations. Tomorrow, Breit knew, the number of Tigers in the field could double.

The reports in his hands did not lie. Every time a Tiger appeared – in any amount, one to a dozen – and was utilized the way it should be, the battle swayed its way. The map table showed the results, revealing the difference these tanks were making. All three II SS Panzer divisions along with Grossdeutschland, each with Tiger battalions, had ranged far out in front of their flanking units, spearheading the drive to Oboyan and Kursk. Other units without Tigers failed to keep up.

Abram Breit dug fingers into his brow. He should have seen this sooner. But perhaps not, perhaps it took these five days of fighting for the numbers to congeal and this fundamental truth to appear. Perhaps he’d caught it in time. In any event, he knew he was right.

Stop the Tigers, or you will not stop the German offensive.

The Reds had to change their tactics, they had to engage the Tigers at every chance, at any cost. Find them, charge them, and don’t just knock them out. Kill them. Then the Soviets’ numerical advantages can assert themselves. But so long as Tigers stay on the battlefield, because of their power, armor, and their raw reluctance to die, and because they have been given only to crack units, the outcome of Citadel will hang in the balance.

Abram Breit carried in his head something more powerful than any tank, or any weapon at Kursk. He had all the German information for the battle neatly memorized. He possessed the numbers for every SS and Wehrmacht division, their troops, artillery, armor, air power, casualties.

With what he knew, Breit could thwart Citadel.

He called for the stick-bearer now. A tall, bald lad moved forward. The staffer shoved the Reds backward out of Sukho-Solotino, retreating up the Oboyan road. Then he pushed Leibstandarte – and the young Spaniard riding his Tiger – in.

Breit lit another cigarette. He watched the curls of his smoke spread over the battle map.

He stubbed out the butt when he knew what to do.

‘Major.’

‘Yes, Colonel.’ Grimm attended him quickly.

Arrange a flight for me to Berlin.’

Grimm hesitated, baffled. ‘Yes, Colonel. May I ask why?’

‘I need to report to the Führer.’

Major Grimm looked down at the map table, uneasy. Everything seemed in order. What had come up so suddenly that Abram Breit needed to fly back to Berlin to report to Hitler?

Breit handed the page to Grimm. Let the major deduce what he will about Hitler. Breit would concoct something for that madman’s ears, make it sound urgent and vital.

‘Within the hour, Major.’

Abram Breit left the map room.

July 8 2010 hours Slatino aerodrome

Breit was coated in dust.

Grimm had not found a staff car quickly enough to suit Breit. Instead, a motorcycle courier was given orders to carry the colonel to Slatino’s aerodrome as fast as possible. Perhaps this was the major’s way of giving Breit back a fuck you. For the eighty-kilometer journey, Breit had ridden in an open sidecar over busted roads, pontoon bridges, and dirt tracks. He wore goggles and held on with white knuckles. He could not smoke for the entire insane trip, the driver was determined to make the best time and showcase his motorcycle skill to the colonel.

Now, Breit stood from the idling sidecar. He looked down at his uniform, matted with dirt and grease kicked up by the wheels of vehicles the motorcycle passed. Pulling the goggles from his eyes, he felt a seal of grime and sweat break on his cheeks. He imagined himself to be the image of the German combat officer, filthy, a man of action, like a picture of Rommel.

The driver was doubly dirty and grinning. He’d gunned the motorcycle right to the steps of the waiting Heinkel in H-16 bomber. The plane’s motors fired the moment the motorcycle stopped. The props began to spin, the sound of the cranking engines drowned out the motorcycle. Breit let himself be amused at how much Germany assisted him in duping her.

The courier saluted and spun away. Breit stood in the prop wash, hoping some of the dust would blow off him. A pilot appeared in the doorway, waving him up. Breit nodded and climbed the steps.

He took his seat. The crew left him alone in the belly of the plane. Breit carried no briefcase or papers with him. This helped give the impression of a top-secret mission, that the information could only be carried safely in his brain. In truth, there was nothing he needed to haul back to Berlin to show Hitler and his staff. Breit would simply give the Führer a progress briefing on Citadel, almost a courtesy call. He might get scolded for taking Hitler’s time, perhaps not, and would simply hop a plane and fly back to Belgorod and his map table.

First, he would visit the museum.

The flight to Berlin would cover two thousand kilometers and take five hours. Breit would arrive after three in the morning. Time to have his uniform cleaned, catch a few hours of sleep, then go to the Reichs Chancellery. Perhaps Hitler would not even be in Berlin when he got there. The Führer might decide to head for East Prussia in the morning. Who knows with that man? He had too much power, too many people around him saying ‘Yes.’ Hitler lived in a fantasy world, a world of conquest and German hegemony. Sometimes from the looks of him he seemed to live in hell. It was perverse that Abram Breit, the spy, was the only person Hitler could talk to for the truth about the war and what was happening to Germany. The lone man in his presence Hitler could trust was one who was betraying him.

The bomber revved and rumbled to the runway. The plane shook its rivets and sprinted ahead, lifting off. Breit gazed out his window over the wing at Russia letting go. He felt no allegiance to this land he was helping, this backward, unfinished place. He was a German, and what he was doing, he did for Germany. Russia was nothing but a tool for the changes he and others saw must come about.

Breit sat back, listening to the droning, rising plane. He lit his first cigarette in over an hour. The bomber gained altitude. The country below became immense, tinged crimson by the coming dusk. Breit looked away. It was too much, to think that he was affecting all this, to a thousand horizons.

July 8 2025 hours Heinkel in H-16 bomber altitude three thousand meters above L’ubotin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Get up!’ the man yelled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 9 0005 hours somewhere west of Slatino

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 9 0310 hours moving north with the 3rd Mechanized Brigade along the Oboyan road

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

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

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

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

Dimitri sat numb.

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

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

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

July 9 0520 hours at the foot of Hill 260. third Soviet defense belt the Oboyan road

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

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

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

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

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

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

When he was finished, Dimitri gazed up the hill in front of him. He knew this hill, had driven past it a dozen times in the month of war games before the battle. He’d never imagined things would go so badly in the battle that he’d actually have it at his back. This was Hill 260.8, named like every other piece of high ground on the military maps for its metric height above sea level. Hill 260.8 had a commanding view of the approaching steppe. It was the final natural defense before Oboyan. To make sure the Germans and Russians met right here, the Oboyan road cut the hill in half. Six kilometers to the north was the village of Novoselovka. Twenty kilometers beyond that was Oboyan and a straight course into Kursk. Hill 260.8 was in the center of the Red Army’s third and final major defensive belt on the southern front. It was their last stand.

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

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

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

‘Pick that up.’

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

Valentin said again, ‘Pick that up.’

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

‘Do you have any work to do?’

The boy’s skin was smirched below a white mask around the eyes where his goggles had been. Valya was a better fighter than most, and for that Dimitri was proud of him. But Dimitri was so tired, standing in front of his Communist son, he was frazzled by his black mood and the prospect of another day’s battle. The boy had walked over just to take what small shred of power Dimitri was gleaning from this morning, pretending to be a hetman while others did their chores and he merely watched, an elder, a personage. This is what the Communists do, he thought. They make everyone equal by seeing that everyone obeys. That’s not freedom. Sometimes freedom is to throw the fucking paper on the ground and leave it there. Valya was waiting for an answer. Dimitri looked at his boy and felt himself sinking into Valentin’s equality, where he had no more temper, no miserable mood to call his own, no warm sky to pause under, he was not a hetman. It seemed he’d been fighting everything and everyone, across every tick of the damn clock for years. The tank, the Germans, his fear, his exhaustion – and the one fight he wanted, the one for his son’s soul, he could not take the battlefield, because his son would not call him Papa.

He was so tired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dima watched the world turning and not the event in front of him. He lowered his hands. He took the cigarette off his lips and tossed it aside. The diving German planes screeched from a long way off. They were coming, but there was time. Where was Valya? Ah, there, running up, so young and beautiful, he comes fast, too, like the Germans. Dimitri licked the tobacco taste on his lips. Drive? Alright.

Sasha leaped onto the tank and slipped down the hatch. Dimitri found himself sliding into his seat and firing up the engine before Valentin had tumbled in and began shouting orders, even before all their headsets were tugged on. The General shot forward. Dimitri’s hands took the steering levers in a strong grip. Oddly, his weakness and exhaustion had vanished. Sasha tilted his machine-gun up toward the onrushing Stukas and let loose an entire belt of ammunition. Dimitri drove straight at the diving planes. He knew their tactic: Make the Russian tanks veer away, then fire their 30 mm cannons into the thinly armored rear engine compartments. Valya’s boots on his shoulders did nothing to pull him away from his headlong charge into the German guns. Dimitri watched them come through his open hatch door. Their shrieking dives were lost under the clank of his tank. The planes split out of their tight black blade, choosing targets. One pilot singled Dimitri out. Twin flashes stuttered under the Junker’s wings. Sasha answered the blast with his own, punier machine-gun. Good for you, Dimitri thought. Talk back to him, Sasha. Black flak bursts spat in the air around the German. Dimitri eyed the ground for the fountains of dirt plowed up by the Stuka’s glittering guns. There, to the right, like a seam bursting in the earth. Valya’s boot almost kicked Dimitri down out of his seat, shoving him left, left! Dimitri threw the right lever, hauled back on the left and in an instant shifted into the next gear, the General tipped up onto the port tread but crashed back down and dashed out of the row of the bullets. The Stuka pulled up from his dive and Dimitri heard it, an angry bitch of a wail, he thought, and suddenly, under the black bent wings of the fighter-bomber streaking past, he awoke from his slow-motion world to the sweat-dripping fearful peril that he and his son and his crew were in.

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

The General’s intercom was silent. No one uttered anything for the minutes Dimitri skirted the cratering ground, no one of them cheered him on, racing out of the Stukas’ guns. Dimitri had the only upward view through his raised hatch; the sky was a rumpled quilt of smoke and darting wings. The rattling bang of the Stukas’ machine-guns melded with the roar of their engines and the noises Dimitri wrung from the General’s motor. The battlefield was insane. A row of bullets marched right up the glacis plate and across the turret, like a dozen hammers and chisels, bits of the General were chewed off but the armor held. Beside Dimitri, Sasha swiveled his machine-gun with a fury, looking for something to shoot at. Dimitri guessed there were sixty Stukas in the air. The Germans wanted Hill 260.8 bad, they wanted to bust open the Oboyan road, some urgency drove them this morning even harder than in the past four days of combat. These planes were but the leading edge of a battering ram. Dimitri sensed it, the desperation of the Germans. They’re running out of time. We need to live a little longer, he thought to his son and his crew, his tank and his army under the onslaught around him.

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

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

Sasha wiped a hand over his dirty scarlet cheeks.

What Dimitri saw across the plain below Hill 260.8 throttled his heart. Tanks. A hundred of them, in a line as far east and west as he could see to the limits of his open hatch, tanks like a poisoned vein, venom in the earth. They had to stretch from Verkhopenye to Sokho-Solotino, a ten-kilometer swath on either side of the Oboyan road, with Dimitri smack in the middle. The Stukas overhead now had the Sturmoviks to contend with. The ground attack was the real hammer blow of the German battering ram to snatch the road. This was tank against tank.

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

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

Go.

July at the foot of Hill 260.8 0750 hours the Oboyan road

Dimitri descended into the battle. It took its shape around him, like a current flowing past a prow. The immense noise and shuddering vibrations faded to a fizz in his ears. His feet on the pedals and his fists on the levers ruddered the tank through the flow of fires and howl. Pasha and Sasha faded, too, they moved like dipping oars, propelling the General into the waves of combat. Dimitri did not notice the ruin and din the way a sailor does not focus on the water, his eye is to the wind that drives him. Valya was that wind. The boy issued orders with voice and tapping feet, he lit up the morning with bonfires that were enemies, he started and halted the tank, rocked it with the cannon and recoil, every move was commanded by him. Valentin fought the battle, and Dimitri fought only the tank. There was peace in this, peace in the midst of horror. Dimitri left his hatch door open, to see as much of the field as he could. He exposed himself to exploding shrapnel, to a million zinging bullets, but there was nothing left to him in the world, he had no clan, he was no one’s hetman. The day was enormous, bigger and more tumultuous than anything he’d ever experienced.

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

The field that separated the T-34s from the German tanks was five kilometers deep and fifteen kilometers wide. The land was even and colored by smashed grasses, with no trees or streams to break the table. The slope up to Dimitri’s position was gentle and his view of the enemy tanks was unhindered, despite the battle haze, the fumes and spittle of fighting and dying machines. A medley of German tanks clattered forward. Dimitri spotted mostly boxy Mark IVs coming in wedge formations. A handful of feeble Mark IIIs bounced over the ruts like runt schoolkids desperate to keep up. He swept his gaze over the German advance, no fewer than fifty tanks spread before him. He wondered how many he did not see. The leviathans in their pack could not be hidden. Tigers.

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

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

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

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

He spun through a field increasingly clotted with burning T-34s. Twenty or more tanks smoldered in varying stages of destruction, some wrecked and dismembered, some aflame and whole, some silent and still. The toll of the battle was swinging away from him. Red soldiers trotted past, retreating north up the road and Hill 260.8, some without weapons, running from the beating they’d taken in their forward trenches. Two thousand black jots appeared around the arrays of German tanks, their panzergrenadiers advancing alongside their armor, the classic Blitzkrieg tactic, unbeatable.

The first tier of the final Soviet defense line before Oboyan had been breached. German tanks began to roll in front of their smoking dead comrades, the battlefield gobbled a hundred, two hundred meters more of the Oboyan road. Now the distance between the two tank armies was lessened. Valentin’s shots came faster, the enemy was larger in his sights. Dimitri rambled through a thinning Russian force, the Germans came up the long grade like a tide, sweeping into the trenches, bubbling over the sandcastle redoubts of Russia that would not hold them back.

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

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

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

For a moment Valya gave no reaction. Dimitri gunned into second gear and did not veer. Valentin’s boot tapped on Dimitri’s right shoulder. Turn, the boot asked. Dimitri did not yield, driving at the heart of an enemy wedge, into the smoking center where a Tiger towered. The boot nudged again, like a kind angel on his shoulder beseeching him to come around and flee, to live and bear these others in the tank with him away to live. Why? he asked, and in answer the center of the wedge four hundred meters away smoked again, a shell on a flat trajectory shrieked past and exploded somewhere behind. Sasha beside him leaned into his machine-gun and his vision block, firing and spinning the barrel at targets, they were close enough now to the German sappers for the boy to pitch in, and Dimitri thought, Good for you, Sasha. He was sorry to carry the two youngsters with him into the blackness he foresaw in his and his son’s futures, where there was no clan, where the Germans took the road today and Russia lost the battle for Kursk maybe tomorrow and finally the war, so there would be no more freedom. That would be a dead life, a conquered life. Sasha and Pasha won’t want that life, either. The battle mists sucked him forward, Dimitri shifted gears again. He didn’t decide this, to die today. But the leaflet had said ‘at all costs.’ What was he, Dimitri Berko, to not be spent on the Oboyan road? He knew he was nothing worth preserving.

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

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

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

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

Both boot soles pressed beside Dimitri’s neck. At the signal he skidded to a halt. Sasha swayed at the failing momentum but kept firing his machine-gun, baring his teeth at what he watched himself do through his periscope. One of Valya’s feet left Dimitri’s shoulder for the firing pedal. There were plenty of targets, tanks everywhere three hundred meters away. Valentin wasted no time picking an enemy and letting fly. Within seconds the inside of the General was packed with the chattering machine-gun and the cannon, the reek of sulphur, the recoil and hot spitting of the spent casing, then the winding engine and Dimitri’s flailing arms weaving the General back and forth, wending snake-patterns into the path of the German advance. They were hectic moving toward their finish, all four doing their jobs, focused on their purposes, to finish well. How many shells did they have left? Dimitri wondered. They’d picked up an extra dozen, maybe they had twenty on board, five more machine-gun belts – it didn’t matter, there wasn’t enough, whatever the number. Dimitri drew the General closer to the advancing Germans.

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

The intercom crackled.

‘Stay here.’

Dimitri halted the tank.

‘Back up.’

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

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

Dimitri saw nothing but the scorched dirt wall of the crater in front of him. Valentin goosed the turret left and fired. The scalding casing flopped on the rubber mat, hissing. Pasha fed the breech and swept the casing aside. Dimitri turned in his seat to watch his son. The boy’s face was smashed against his range finder, his hands played the traverse and elevation controls. The tank seemed to bend itself around him, gauges and handles, switches and eyepieces. He was a Communist, a drone, and this Soviet tank was made for him, for the peasants and the fighting believers. Dimitri had done his son a huge kindness bringing him here to the brink, where he could lay down his life for Lenin and Stalin, those purgatives of the human spirit. No one would forget Valentin Berko after today, the Cossack sergeant who charged straight into the German maw while the rest of the Red force withdrew up the hill. Pasha and Sasha, they didn’t know they were going to die. They would be forgotten.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Let’s go have a look.’

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

Valentin and Pasha fired. The long cannon swiveled, paused, and fired again. The tank jumped with the reports, but no more than a horse over a hedge and Dimitri sat on his heels, balanced, while Sasha held on. The turret rested for long moments, listless smoke trailed out of the big gun. Then the fat round turret whirred and rotated far to the right, away from the dozen or so enemy tanks and thousand grenadiers bearing straight down on the General’s crater. This close to the leading edge of the German advance, Valentin chose for his last precious rounds to target a Tiger four hundred meters to the left. The giant was at the head of a wedge, broadside. It rumbled slowly across the field, inexorable and unwitting, vulnerable.

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

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

The General’s gun crept to the right, stopped, and fired. The roar was splendid. A corona of blasted air and dust swept up from the steppe, then returned to it tumbling. The Tiger smoked. Valya scored a direct hit on the massive tread. The Tiger jerked as though tripped and did not move. Behind it, the wedge of armor slowed and halted, unsure. Valentin fired again, splurging his waning ammunition on the Tiger, to make certain the thing was killed. The big tank disappeared in a ragged globe of fire.

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

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

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

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

He scrabbled on all fours around the links of the General’s tracks. Haze wafted off the glacis plate. The .88 shell had pierced the crater berm and struck the frontal armor of the T-34. Dimitri had no way to know if the plating had held, if Valentin and Pasha were dead.

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

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

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

Three Sturmoviks broke their engagements in the mansion of sky and streaked down, trailing vapor, wings sparking cannon fire and smoke. They dove in low over the crater – zoom! one, two, three -Dimitri listened to them attack and bank out. The Soviet fighters circled to come around again. More artillery poured down from the hill. Sasha stirred. Dimitri pinched shut the gash in Sasha’s forehead, the bleeding eased between his grubby fingers. He sat like this, marveling at the furor around him; the clash between armies right now was fought not for control of the Oboyan road, not for anything historic at all, but roared and erupted just for him and these boys he’d brought out here. This was majestic. Sasha needed to wake to see it. Dimitri squeezed the boy’s earlobe.

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

‘Are you alright?’

Sasha blinked. ‘What happened?’

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

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

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

Valentin said nothing.

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

Dimitri stood from Sasha, trailing a hand over the boy’s shoulder before he stepped away. Sasha sat still. Dimitri swung up onto the T-34’s deck. He rose to his full height beside the turret looking over the crater’s lip. A wall of eruptions barred the Germans from coming any closer. Round after round detonated in their ranks; the rest of the enemy advance on all sides was being ignored by every gunner on Hill 260.8 and in the remaining defense bunkers along the road and by the three Soviet fighter planes who’d taken up the mission to save the gallant little T-34 that had knocked out six German tanks single-handedly, including a Tiger. The German wedge closest to the crater recoiled under the concerted Russian salvos, their tanks and infantry temporarily stymied.

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

July 9 1005 hours the village of Kriulkovo

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

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

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

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

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

‘Don’t be like that, Lana.’

‘Leave the poor animal alone, Witch,’ Daniel called from his mound. ‘It’s understandable if she doesn’t like you.’

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

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

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

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

‘Too many airplanes,’ added Daniel.

‘Did you see what she did to her plane?’ Ivan rolled over on his straw. ‘Planes probably don’t like her anymore, either.’

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

The barn door creaked open.

A German soldier stepped inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 9 1340 hours

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

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

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

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

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

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

The barn door creaked open. She stepped away from the German. His tunic was wet. Under her gaze he retreated to his stillness.

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

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

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

‘What is your name and rank?’

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

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

‘Standartenführer Abram Breit.’

‘What is your unit?’

‘Erste SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.’

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

‘Filip.’

‘Yes.’

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

‘Yes.’

‘Listen to me, Nazi.’

Filip translated this.

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

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

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

Plokhoi and Filip continued.

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

The prisoner nodded, agreeable. This bothered Katya, that an SS officer would behave this way, without defiance, with such cooperation. His name was Breit. He didn’t seem frightened. He didn’t know Plokhoi, or he would have been.

The prisoner said, ^‘Ja.’

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

‘J a.’

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

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

‘Nazi?’

‘Ja.’

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

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

‘Colonel,’ she said. ‘Colonel.’

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

‘Colonel, a word.’

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

‘Yes, Witch.’

‘I believe I know where Leonid Lumanov is.’

‘Your pilot.’

‘Yes. I intend to rescue him.’

‘You intend.’

Katya did not hesitate. ‘Yes. Tomorrow.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where is your pilot?’ Plokhoi asked her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, Colonel?’

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

‘I don’t know’

Colonel Bad tipped his cap to her.

‘Please consider it.’

July 9 2130 hours

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

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

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

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

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

‘Danke,’ Breit said.

Filip spoke with the German. They kept their voices low in the fading light of the barn. Katya listened from where she sat. The language the two men spoke was harsh, it sounded like a sweeping broom. She thought about how little she knew of Germans and Germany. There had never been a need to be familiar with them, they were targets, invaders of Russia. Nothing ever written or spoken about them by the Soviets had given the impression that these were men at all. Just cruel creatures to be stamped out by any means possible, no sacrifice was too great to kill a German. She watched this one sip stew out of the bowl with his tied hands, the way any man would. Filip squatted on his haunches at the prisoner’s feet. The two chatted. Filip nodded many times to things the German had to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The elder translated while the German talked.

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

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

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

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

‘Why were you going to Berlin?’

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

An art historian. An intelligence officer. If that’s what you say, good. Now you’re a prisoner. That’s all you are anymore.’

‘No. I’m something else.’

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

Filip turned to Katya.

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

Katya almost laughed when Filip gave these words to the German. She laid a finger to her own breast.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I was hit on the head.’

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

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

‘There,’ she said, slapping Filip’s arm when he translated the word. The starosta nodded that she was right.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Are you? What do you know?’

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

‘Do you know,’ Breit said through the elder, ‘that in the south the SS has penetrated to your last defense belt? That the fighting has moved within sight of the towers of Oboyan? Your Soviet army is losing three men for every German soldier. Three tanks for every German tank. Planes. Artillery. Everything. Do you know how long you can stand this kind of carnage until the weight of the battle shifts away from you? Do you? I don’t. And I know a great deal more than you can imagine.’

Katya reeled at this. She had no idea, just as the prisoner implied. What foot soldier or running partisan could ever know beyond what they saw? She had been shot down behind the lines just as the battle started. This was the first news, not even Plokhoi told their cell how things were going. The battle for Kursk was surely huge, ranging over so much steppe, far beyond the struggles of one, beyond the rivers and bends in the earth, even past what she had glimpsed from her cockpit. But was this German telling the truth? Probably not. Why would he? He’s spouting propaganda. Perhaps he believes what he says because it’s what he’s been told. Even so, she recalled the hundred-plus night bombing missions she’d been on. The Germans always had more supplies to be blown up. Always another train puffing in. Germany was an industrial giant next to Russia. They’d declared war on England and America, too. What kind of people can do that? Could they still win in Russia?

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

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

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

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

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

Katya prodded. ‘What?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katya stood, feeling the whiplash of anger. This was enough of Breit; he was something she’d been curious about – an enemy brought close for a little while, for an afternoon and night in a remote village barn – but like a cave she’d wandered into, now she was far enough from the light at the opening to turn around and go back. She lacked the desire to delve farther. Tomorrow she would try to rescue Leonid, she may die in the attempt along with this German and the old starosta. She worried every day for Papa and Valentin, she grieved for Vera and too many others already. Where was the room in her for Breit’s pleading? If by any chance he was a spy, then he was a traitor to his own country, and the Cossack in her found that sour and wormy. If not, then he was just a liar and a coward. In either case, his story was not worth reporting to Colonel Bad. She would keep the prisoner’s secret, not because he asked her but because she would look foolish repeating it.

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

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

July 9 2250 hours Hill 260.8

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

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

The wreckage of the Russian resistance on this crest was everywhere. Abandoned American trucks tilted on blown tires bearing empty Katyusha missile racks in the beds. Artillery pieces with spiked barrels were left aimed at level trajectories, the fighting had been so close. Only a few Red tanks remained behind when they retreated off Hill 260.8, just the ones blown to hell beyond repair. The battle for Kursk had become a tank battle, the Reds and Germans alike knew that, and the Soviets were uncanny at getting their smoking T-34s off the battlefield and ready for combat the next day. This was their genius, Luis thought, numbers. Men and machines and the dead. Around him lay more bodies than he’d ever seen on one field; the Russians got their tanks off this hill but there were too many dead to cart away.

Balthasar the gunner came to stand beside him, binoculars around his neck. The man smelled the worst of anyone in the crew. In days of intense fighting, Balthasar had worked the hardest, spinning the handwheel to elevate the giant gun, pressing his eyes to the padded browpieces to take aim, firing and finding another target. The others did their jobs, hoisting shells, working the radio and machine-gun, driving. But this one was the reaper. There is a God, Luis thought, and to undo His work there is a toll. Balthasar showed that cost in his stink and in eyes that were barely able to focus after staring so long through magnifying optics, past cross-hatches and range numerals.

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

Balthasar wanted something from the panorama below, he squinted to see deep into the ranks of Leibstandarte. Smoke filtered into the air from a dozen smoldering hulks, ruined and juxtaposed against the fifty tanks and twenty assault guns surviving in the division. A handful of shot-down airplanes littered the grassland too, bent propellers like dried daisies. Luis studied the young gunner beside him and for the first time wondered about him. So cool and competent, such a chill in his fighting, angular and Germanic in profile in the waning day. No wonder Hitler had been so confident to make his war, with a nation of these boys to do it. Their uniforms were designed dark for a reason, to show off how white his soldiers were against them, how pure and potent they were. Not like the Soviets, in their yellow-brown khakis, earthen creatures, muddy. Balthasar stirred. He pointed.

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

Luis followed the direction of the gunner’s dirty finger. Hunkering among the tanks and milling battalions of panzergrenadiers were three more Tigers, repaired at Luchki and put back into the field this evening. Even at a distance, their great bulk was discernible among the Mark IIIs and IVs. Now Leibstandarte had four Tigers.

‘Just in time,’ Luis said.

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

Luis put out his hand for the binoculars. Balthasar turned them over. Through the glasses, beyond the Soviets’ spiny bunkers and trenches, rose the towers of Oboyan. The city was in sight, in reach.

‘In time for what?’ Balthasar asked.

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

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

Luis turned west, away from the objective city and the precious road leading to it twenty kilometers over the steppe. Hill 260.8 stood as the deepest incursion into the Russian lines on the southern front. With one more strong heave, with Leibstandarte alongside 11th Panzer and Grossdeutschland, the Oboyan road would fall. But the forces guarding their right and left flanks were taking terrible hits from the Reds every day, and their northward pace continued to slog. Hill 260.8 was too far out in front and exposed to Red flank attacks. The drive on Oboyan was being thwarted not from the extended center but from the sides. So tonight, under the order in Luis’s pocket issued from General Hoth, the spear thrust of the German strike at Kursk was to be blunted and split into a trident. Eleventh Panzer had been ordered to pivot to the west, away from the Oboyan road, to clean up Soviet flank assaults north of Verkhopenye. Grossdeutschland would regroup here astride the road and relieve elements of Leibstandarte. The three divisions of II SS Panzer Corps were directed to shift their advance away from Oboyan, to the northeast. The hope was that they would crush Soviet resistance there and unlock the gates for Kempf’s overdue army. The still-powerful SS divisions would encounter strong Russian reserves after wheeling to the east, but with enough Luftwaffe support, and the return of more repaired Tigers, Totenkopf, Leibstandarte, and Das Reich ought to smash open a new – though longer – route to Kursk.

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

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

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

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

Luis faced east. The land there darkened first.

‘We’re going to Prokhorovka.’

July 10 0415 hours Orlovka

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

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

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

Something happened in that crater, something was left behind in its bowl. When Dimitri lifted groggy Sasha up on the tank deck, Valya came out of the hatch to help. Pasha followed. The son and the boy both glared down at Sasha, disapproving, as if Sasha were indulgent to be bleeding again. The look on Pasha’s platter face was the same as that on Valya’s, a sort of scowl from on high, that Communist disdain for the individual. And it is always individuals who bleed. Sides had been chosen, Dimitri could tell. Pasha the loader joined with Sergeant Berko the commander, versus the two in the lower half of the tank, skinny quiet Sasha with his little machine-gun and penchant for being shot and old stubborn Dima. Sasha held on to the turret handles outside for the second time in three days while Dimitri jumped back into his driver’s seat and roared the T-34 out of the hole. The Soviet counter-assault from the hill shielded their retreat, and they got away. Valya sat on his rattling throne with Pasha beside him, the silent hot cannon between them, the wheels and dials of the tank all around him -Valentin, the gunner hero – the ammo racks were all empty, the floor bins were rifled and depleted – Pasha the loader of every round – and no one spoke while old Cossack Dima scrambled them up the hill and back inside the withdrawing Red lines.

When he finally stopped, they were behind the defensive positions of the 3011th Rifle Division east of Novoselovka. Soldiers manned the hundred artillery pieces that had saved the General, they kept blasting away at the resumed German advance creeping up the Oboyan road. These men shouted Urrab! and raised their helmets to the little T-34 in their midst, the brave tank they’d rescued. Dimitri shut the engine down and clambered out. Sasha had climbed down under his own steam, and a field medic was already there reaching for stitches and a bandage. Valentin lifted his hatch cover and exited the turret. The artillerymen gave him a cheer. Valentin smiled uncomfortably from the deck of the tank. Then he did something Dimitri had never seen him do. He lifted his arm and acknowledged the salvos of applause from the artillery. Dimitri detached himself from any emotion about the scene. He squeezed Sasha’s hand and left it for later to wonder about.

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

A metallic knock from under the repair tent reared him out of his reverie, and sadness ran down him with the droplets off his ears and nose. He was drenched with a bowed head. Soldiers splashed past him on their way in their own lives. Dimitri felt nothing of the warmth of these men around him, they might have been made of iron.

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

‘Hey,’ he shouted, ‘I need a welder.’

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

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

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

Together with the mechanic, Dimitri gathered up the man’s welding tools, plus a tarpaulin and two metal rods. The mechanic had an angular face, he was bald, and powerfully built. He led the way out of the tent – he had to duck, he was so tall – to a quarter-ton truck parked with a large electric welding generator hitched to it. The rumbles of fighting eight kilometers to the south muttered under the rainfall and their sloshing boots. The Germans would not get the Oboyan road; even so, they were keeping up the pressure to stop the Reds from going over to the offensive. The Germans weren’t quitting. They’d come close, maybe closer than they knew, to breaking through to Oboyan. The mechanic climbed into the truck, filling the seat with his midriff, the steering wheel almost touched his belly. Cursing the nasty weather under his breath, he wheeled the truck and trailer through the mud, dodging the human traffic growing with the lifting light. He did not smile at Dimitri.

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

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

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

Dimitri nodded.

The mechanic wagged his head to say: You all ought to be dead. Dimitri thought, Yes, we tried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valentin stayed under the tarpaulin longer than someone should who knew nothing about welding. The mechanic cast his eyes over at Pasha. Dark specks of rain spattered on the boy’s dry coveralls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dimitri winced. This was how Valentin evened the score, always. He’d taught the young boy the sword, Valya had excelled with it in the sietch. Now in life, Valentin the man knows nothing else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mechanic smiled now.

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

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

‘Prokhorovka,’ the mechanic mumbled while he cut.

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

‘Here, Papa.’

July 10 0640 hours beside the Vorskla River kilometers southwest of the village of Vorskla

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

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

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

They rode in the open. The land was so flat that no German patrol could come within kilometers of them without being seen. The six were just a handful of Russians going between towns after daybreak, nothing suspicious about that in a landscape of farmers. Breit was no horseman. His mount’s head bobbed walking along the river, balking and wanting to turn always out of the group, down to the water.

Filip rode alongside.

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

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

Breit was given his hands and feet. The ropes were looped and stored in the big one’s knapsack. His name was Ivan, a funny name for a Russian, it was the nickname the Germans used for all Russians, they were ‘the Ivans.’ A skinny one with slits for eyes was Daniel, who carried knives and guns bulging on him like pine cones. The woman was Katya. She was a pretty girl, almond-eyed and lean. The old man Filip called her ‘Hexe,’ a witch, and did not explain why. Riding behind her, Breit made up his own reasons. She was a witch because she seemed as mean as anything out of a fairy tale. She rode her horse like a broom. She did not hate, though. Not like the old hard one named Josef. That one was a crow. He was black, silent, surely an evil portent when he appeared on any doorstep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I brave enough, Breit wondered inside the morbid gallery of his imagination, to make a break for it? I have a very valuable skin to save. I have a cause, a war to alter. I am historic. Will I try? Or will I shuffle out of the history books off to Siberia, quiet again, quiet forever? I don’t know. When I became a spy, I didn’t prepare myself for dying, not the way a soldier does. I am so scared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 10 0715 outside the village of Vorskla

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

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

Approaching the village, a clutch of women looked up at the clopping horses. The women moved closer together the way penned animals do, until their hips touched, their aprons made a white barrier to the two riders. Filip was their elder. This made no difference to the old women barring his way. Filip rode into the village with a partisan.

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

‘You’re back,’ the woman said.

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

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

The starosta made no notice of her words.

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

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

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

Every movement in the village stopped when they rode past. The few men straightened in the fields to look over the tops of stalks and grasses, they looked like scarecrows in white billowy blouses. Women continued to gravitate toward each other, pressing shoulders and hips, whispers to ears. Filip rode to a small blue house. Its eaves were festooned with white gingerbread and shutters. Filip stopped in front of the porch. Neighbor women came on their stoops to watch and cluck. Katya saw her first child in this village. A boy, very dirty, gripped a woman’s skirt and pulled it in front of him, a naive shield. Filip did not dismount. He waited, his horse shifted, the rifle on Filip’s back creaked, the leather and harness rattled.

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

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

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

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

Filip’s twin.

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

Filip spoke. ‘You’re coming with us.’

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

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

‘Katya. Get the others.’

Filip did not look away from Nikolai. The eyes of the two were ensnared, the brothers’ glares tangled like snakes across the dusty road. Katya tucked the pistol into her belt. She swung to her saddle and turned for the hill where the others waited with the prisoner and an extra mount. Riding away, she saw over her shoulder Nikolai turn and go back inside his house. Filip stayed in his saddle, staring after his brother, his face obscured under the big felt hat.

July 10 0800 hours three kilometers west of Kazatskoe

The partisans, Breit the prisoner, and Nikolai the traitor rode through an eerie peace. They took their horses and the empty mount into the open, across fallow fields and wide vales of grass. The sun stood at its highest and the horses walked on their own shadows. Nothing impeded the riders’ vision for many kilometers, the land sprawled even and untended. The riders were far from the fighting here and the day appeared normal, sunny and quiet. Katya was lulled for a little while by the sounds of hooves in dirt, men in saddles, and the gold of warmth on her skin.

None of the men spoke. Filip rode in front, leading his twin brother to Kazatskoe. Daniel and Ivan came next, riding on either side of the German. Breit kept his mouth shut since Josef had clouted him, and he rode better, too, wanting no more attention for himself. Good, Katya thought, she had enough to worry about. Josef came at the rear. She turned to look at him from time to time to be sure the man was still there, separate and grim.

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

‘Are you angry with me, Filip?’

‘Yes. I don’t want to do this.’

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

‘He’s my brother.’

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

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

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

‘I’m sorry, Filip Filipovich.’

The starosta nodded, his big brim dipped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What did he look like?’

‘Average. Brown hair. Slender.’

‘What color eyes? Does your brother remember?’

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

She envisioned this. Leonid, she thought. God, Leonid. She asked, ‘What will happen if we don’t get to him?’

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

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

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

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

At 0915 hours the village of Kazatskoe appeared, an oasis of farm buildings in an expanse of greens and brown. From her saddle five kilometers away, the village appeared to Katya something dreamy and liquid, standing in a pool of shimmering heat mirage against the earth. Three silos rose as centurions, the rest of the village hunkered around them, homes and outbuildings. Five days ago when the battle started, this place was only four kilometers from the front lines. Now it was a drained place, intact but emptied. The Germans had billeted here, fortified the little town, then moved north with their attack. They left silence, like a spoiled well. There should be tractors, she thought, there should be a blacksmith’s anvil clanging through this heat, laundry snapping on lines. The war was here in the ghosts of sound.

Josef trotted forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I know.’

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

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

‘Yes,’ answered Nikolai.

Josef swung in his saddle to face Breit.

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

Josef swung his horse now to Katya.

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

Katya was stunned. Josef tipped his hat brim to her and turned. Nikolai fell in and the two rode toward Kazatskoe.

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

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

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

Katya was uneasy with the question. ‘Lover.’ It was a term from peacetime, when girls and boys paired off like that, not when they were forced to spend years away from home – changing and hardening years – not when they died by the hundreds and thousands every day. And there was Filip, lonely and hating being here, a man who’d claimed he would murder his brother. Could Katya have a boyfriend in front of poor Filip?

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

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

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

The two came slowly, no need for haste and attention. Josef rode behind Nikolai, who kept his head down, the match to his brother Filip. When they were close, the twins did not look at each other.

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

‘He’s in there,’ Nikolai said.

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

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

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

‘How do we get inside?’ Ivan asked.

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

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

Katya spoke.

‘Nikolai?’

‘What?’ the twin answered. He’d become more lively than his brother. Perhaps he hoped to wipe away his stain by helping free the downed pilot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And the guard inside, Witch?’

She thought of Leonid’s face, too bashed to tell the color of his eyes. His eyes were blue. Sky blue. She fingered the knife at her hip, the pistol in her belt.

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

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

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

‘I’ll go.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Give me your knife.’

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

Josef nodded to Katya.

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

‘Blue house. Shutter,’ she repeated.

‘One minute.’

‘Once we’re inside. I understand.’

‘Good. Go get your pilot, Witch.’

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

July 10 1030 hours one kilometer west of Kazatskoe

Without hurry, Filip and Katya rode toward the western rim of the village. The sun seemed not to have moved from its noon-high perch. It glowered on the two riders, hot and intent, in audience to the rescue they would attempt. Katya sweated in her loose wool coat. She wanted shade and rest. She wanted not to be afraid. A few times during the ride to the village, she glanced behind her to spot Josef. The man rode far to their left, then was nowhere to be seen.

Filip dug out a kerchief and handed it to Katya.

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

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

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

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

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

‘No.’

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

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

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

‘Is that your pilot?’ Filip asked.

‘Leonid Lumanov. Yes. My pilot.’

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

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

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

‘You’re the interpreter. You were here three days ago. I’m a nurse. We’ll get inside and I’ll start counting. Even if it’s not Leonid in there, we’re going to get the pilot out. Just move when I move.’

‘Yes, Witch. I hope it’s your pilot.’

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

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

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

‘Ja? Was ist lost’

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

Filip and Katya dismounted. Katya felt as though the point of the knife inside the bread were held to her own innards. Filip was intent and silent. They tied the horses to the porch railing. Katya stroked Lana before moving away, to compose herself.

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

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

Leonid lay curled in the far right corner.

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

She reined herself in tight, she knew she would dash across the room to him if she did not. Four. Leonid did not open his eyes, he lay motionless with his wrists between his knees. She approached him, holding the bread out now like a gift, to keep both her hands full so she would not cradle him. She knelt beside him. She set the loaf on the floor. Nine. Leonid’s face was bruised and swollen, dark and straining the skin, the brutal fruit of his interrogations. Had Nikolai stood here asking the questions in Russian while this was done? She glanced back to Filip and saw him staring down at Leonid, wondering the same. The guard asked Filip a question. Even in a foreign tongue Katya could tell Filip’s reply was terse. Eighteen.

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

She did not say his name, the guard would catch that. She murmured, ‘Lie still. It’s me, we’re here for you. Pretend to be unconscious. Can you walk?’

Leonid’s head bobbed one tremor under her hand.

‘Be ready,’ she said.

Thirty-five.

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

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

‘Would you like a piece of bread?’

Forty-five.

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

Fifty-two.

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

Sixty.

She closed her hand around the knife’s haft, buried in the cool spongy bread. She took a step toward the guard, to have her momentum driving forward. She let her mind flee for one beat to Leonid in the corner behind her, to the purple of his lips and sockets, his stench, mentally touching him like she had touched the horse outside, for calm and power. The gray of a German uniform was one stride away, crumbs tumbled down the buttons. The knife was held tight in her hand. She kept her eyes fixed to the guard’s chest, to the spot above the dangling gun, beneath the crumbs, at the heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The door burst open.

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

‘Can you ride, old man?’

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

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

‘Leonya, we’ve got to hurry’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel aimed the pistol at Josef.

‘Let her go,’ he said.

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

‘This is your wife,’ Josef said.

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

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

She got her answer when Katya spoke.

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

‘Shut up, Witch.’

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

‘Let us go, Josef. Please.’

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

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

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

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

‘No,’ the starosta said.

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

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

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

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

Katya shoved Ivan out the door. Leonid was already in a saddle. Josef moved fast to get onto his own horse. Ivan lumbered to his mount. Katya stared across the wide steppe, at the two dust clouds roiling behind the hiwi Nikolai and the escaping prisoner Breit, galloping away.

Katya flew into her saddle. Down the street a rifle snapped, a bullet whizzed past. All the riders kicked their horses and bolted. Katya saw how Leonid rode, not well and barely steady. Ivan stayed close beside him. The four riders lit out into the fields, the thud of rifles bit beneath their hoofbeats. The hiwi and the German absconded in different directions, both away from Kazatskoe. Nikolai scurried back to his home village. Breit ran anywhere, away from the partisans, away from the village where the guards, his countrymen, were shooting at everything on horseback.

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

She pulled alongside Josef.

‘Give me my pistol!’ she shouted.

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

‘Go get the prisoner!’

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

Josef shouted again, reading her expression.

‘We have orders, Witch! The German!’

‘No!’

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

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

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

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

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

With that, Katya yanked Lana’s head around. The horse responded like a dzhigitka mount, digging in her hooves and whirling quick and nimble. Katya clamped tight with her thighs and struck a furious pace straight at Nikolai. She tucked herself low over Lana’s lathering neck, clicking and urging the horse, ‘Tick, tick, hiya!’ absorbing the pumping and pounding of the animal, swelling with it to do the murder that grew closer with every reach of Lana’s long strides.

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

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

Katya laid her eyes to the hiwi and galloped.

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

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

He is clan. This was his wish.

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

‘Witch,’ he pleaded.

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

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

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

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

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

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