Last Citadel

July 10 1030 hours Hill 256.6 near Teterevino, alongside the Prokhorovka road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This attack had three prongs: Totenkopf to the north across the river, Das Reich in the south below the road and rail tracks, and Leibstandarte in the middle. The other two divisions had more tanks: Das Reich possessed almost seventy tanks, Totenkopf over eighty. But theirs were mostly the impotent Mark IIIs. Das Reich was left with a dozen and a half Mark IVs and only one Tiger; Totenkopf had two dozen Mark IVs and just two Tigers. Leibstandarte operated sixty-seven tanks, forty-one of them Mark IVs, and four Tigers. Even though Leibstandarte had not fully regrouped after its pivot away from Oboyan, it was still the most potent of the three SS divisions. So it was the force chosen to go up the gut in the onslaught on Prokhorovka.

The mission for Leibstandarte was a simple one: Lead the charge to Prokhorovka, and crush everything in the way. Totenkopf was already encountering running battles in and out of the small farm villages and river lowlands. In another fifteen minutes when the full attack started, Das Reich would have to charge ahead on the other side of the road and rail line, through scattered forests and rolling knolls where the Reds could duck and counter-punch. Leibstandarte in the middle stared across a mostly level plain where visibility would be exceptional, where enemies would face little but each other. Luis thought of a bullring, where nothing separated the combatants but their wills to kill and survive. He fingered the hilt of the SS knife at his belt. He searched again for the partisan’s pulse in his hand and found it. He turned to the turret, to the raised hatch cover for the mark of Erich Thoma and found it, too, brown and flaking, no longer blood but like the partisan, a memory of blood.

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

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

July 10 1125 hours

The first seconds of the assault stunned him. Cropland and grasses as far as Luis could see, which had been swaying in the dreary wind moments before, now rose together and advanced. Twenty thousand men and weapons, three hundred revving tanks and assault guns, all stirred at once, as though the plates of the earth had shifted; the ground itself seemed to slide forward. The gray-clad grenadier regiments of the three SS divisions put their guns in their hands and their boots into the soil and river and stomped east, over the tracks, across the florid flat steppe. Then came the first flights of air cover. The Luftwaffe’s Henschel 129s droned in slow and wicked, searching for targets in the fields and villages ahead, and above them the sirens of the diving Stukas began to whine in powered dives. There was inconceivable German power concentrated here. The world tilted east at the Russians and Luis urged his Tiger to join the rolling crest. He wondered what the Reds could do to stop them. He unwrapped a packet of crackers and chewed, almost too excited to swallow; he had to guzzle from his canteen to get the crackers down.

The first answering cannonade whistled in from across the Psel. Damn Totenkopf, Luis thought again, they can’t even keep the Reds busy enough in their own sector to stop them from firing at us south of the river. The rounds landed wildly among his panzers, striking nothing but damp ground and flinging muddy clumps. Luis did not batten down his hatch. He kept his eyes on the dark ten thousands walking and riding around him into the Russian defenders of Komsomolets. He was not impatient or jealous that these others came along, too. He was not afraid he would die today. He laid his hands on the quivering, creeping Tiger. Men and machines kept pace around the tank, believing in this machine as a salvation. Balthasar and the hidden crew waited for his order, and then whoever he chose would die instead of him.

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

‘Raining, Captain?’

Luis felt no friendship for these men in his crew. They were his tools. But he’d never been one to let his banderillas grow dull or rusty, the spikes were sharpened before every corrida. He smiled for the loader although he did not try to remember the boy’s name.

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

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

He stood. The Soviet rockets had shot their bolt and the grenadiers were on their feet and moving again. Luis ordered the driver forward. The plain was not cratered much by the Katyushas, the missiles were more frightening than effective. Only one soldier did not rise to join the advance. Luis rode past the body and felt nothing. This wasn’t the time to take stock of his remaining humanity. The Tiger lumbered forward, men walking beside him and standing in other turrets looked up at him; the last thing they wanted from this Tiger tank’s commander right now was introspection.

A Henschel ground-attack plane drove low across his regiment’s line. The pilot tossed out a purple smoke grenade. The canister hit the ground and raised an oily, pastel stink. Luis curled his nostrils and focused on where he was. The signal meant one thing. Tanks.

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

Balthasar spoke in the intercom, he had a target. Luis gave him permission to fire. The tank bucked around Luis when the cannon let go. The other three Tigers in the panzer regiment bayed at almost the same moment. In the following seconds, two dozen assault guns and self-propelled tank destroyers joined in. Two kilometers away, the first towers of smoke and steppe drifted into the air among the charging Red tanks. Luis stood in the turret, bracing himself against every blast from Balthasar’s long barrel, wiping his goggles after each of the gunner’s shots. Balthasar and his loader worked as fast as Luis could give them instructions. Their readiness with another shell and firing solution flowed in tempo with the battle beginning to swirl in the fields. Luis held on tight and between rounds ordered the Tiger forward in careful steps, to keep up with the running grenadiers but not to shorten the distance to the rushing T-34s any quicker than he had to. When Balthasar had a target acquired, Luis stopped to let him fire, put his hands over his helmeted ears, then crept ahead in pace with the infantry. The radio operator transmitted Luis’s commands to the rest of the company, for his platoon to stay in wedge formation around his Tiger, and for the other three platoons of Mark IVs to swing into an echelon left position to protect the flank from T-34s coming in wide from the north. More artillery cascaded in from across the Psel, and another barrage of Katyushas stymied the advance for a minute, driving Luis back inside the Tiger, drawing more mirth from his sweaty crew.

Nothing about the Soviet counterstroke impressed Luis, not even their numbers and the will to squander them. Without their network of trenches and solid defenseworks, the Red infantry were routed swiftly out of foxholes. Antitank guns were abandoned, damaged T-34s were left with their motors running, prisoners came out of the haze with empty hands high. Leibstandarte was outnumbered and outgunned in the grainfields in front of Komsomolets, as they had been on every battlefield since Citadel began. Even so, the Soviet resistance moved aside from Luis’s tanks like geese in the road. By noon, the first grenadiers had entered Komsomolets. Twenty T-34s stood ruined on the steppe behind them, most killed by German tanks, a few blown up by grenadiers in close fighting. The rest of the Soviet force retreated east of the state farm to regroup behind Hill 241.6, to come in another wave later. Leibstandarte captured the farm and spent none of its own precious tanks, perhaps fifteen soldiers dead and fifty wounded. In the lull before grinding up Hill 241.6, while the grenadiers consolidated their hold on the farm buildings, Luis slipped his panzer company into the small forest next to the riddled silos. He crashed his Tiger and his Mark IVs into tree trunks, knocking them down with a careless pride, to make a place for his men and weapons to rest a little while. The green calm of the trees belied the havoc beside the Prokhorovka road. He ordered up ammunition and fuel, food and cigarettes for his tankers. He accepted a mound of mashed potatoes on a plate topped with a warm brown gruel and ate only a quarter of it. Strolling to the edge of the copse, he looked two kilometers east, up the gradual incline of Hill 241.6, the next objective on the road to Prokhorovka.

This is the soldier’s discipline, he thought. Do the job at hand, nothing more, then wait for orders to do another. But he believed he was here in this battle for a reason beyond the others, the grimy tankers and dirty plodding infantrymen, half-deaf artillerymen, crazy pilots, even the fat generals and their pretty staffs. Luis, alone of them all across every horizon today, knew there was no battle for Kursk, there was no Citadel. Those were only labels that would live in history books. No man lives on a page, he lives in his minutes and his skin. Whatever kingdom Germany or Russia carved out of this bloodied land would not survive, none ever has and none ever will, power is transitory, dominion becomes printer’s ink and dust. Nothing outlives a man, not a crown, not a conquest, nothing but a name and honor. It is better to be honored than to be a king. Luis crossed himself there on the edge of the woods, it felt like he was praying, and he thought of Jesus, who was not a king, he thought of his own father, who had outlived many bulls and recalled all the best of them. He thought of Thoma who’d died so stupidly, all his honor trickled out. He smiled at the Russians on Hill 241.6, because he was sent here out of the many thousands to become great.

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

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

Luis read the note. The attack on Hill 241.6 was to start at 1300 hours. Totenkopf had not yet crossed the Psel. South of the rail mound, Das Reich was barely keeping up with Leibstandarte’s forward units. Nonetheless, Leibstandarte was ordered to plunge ahead and take the hill. Again, Luis thought, I am at the knife’s point of the battle. He folded the note into his pocket and walked to stand near his massive Tiger, to be seen with it, linked to it always by those who would tell later of these fiery days.

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

For thirty minutes Luis yanked his Tiger and his Mark IVs back and forth along the base of the long hill. The Russians on the high ground did not spare their ammunition, and he kept his tanks running and difficult to hit. Balthasar did not fire a round, but the Tiger crept among the grenadiers, waiting, prowling for a prey. None presented itself, and Luis would not fire blindly at the crest of the hill, that was the job for his own artillery. He was a tank hunter. The Reds would oblige him if he was patient.

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

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

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

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

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

The Tiger was the last to withdraw the two kilometers to cover. Field kitchens, fuel trucks, and a medic station waited under the dripping trees. The thunderstorm had moved on, leaving dusk in its wake like a bruise. Hill 241.6 fell into German hands while Luis sat on a tree chewing bread. The sounds of fighting from the Psel finally began to rise from a point north of the river, where Totenkopf had at last established a bridgehead. Das Reich made progress south of the road in the forests and villages there. Leibstandarte’s grenadiers dug into positions on top of the hill and between the slope and the rail tracks. All three SS divisions were inching forward to Prokhorovka.

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

At midnight Luis was on top of Hill 241.6. An intense humidity seeped out of the ground. His crew had stripped to their skivvies to try and sleep on a spread tarpaulin. Luis was finished conferring with the other company commanders over a lantern. The casualty report was light for Leibstandarte, only twenty-six killed, one hundred and sixty-eight wounded, and three missing. Estimates indicated the division had smashed over fifty Red tanks. The company commanders were informed that the two other SS divisions were both shy of their objectives on the left and right flanks. None of Totenkopf’s armor had crossed the Psel yet, and Das Reich had not fought any farther than Yasnaya Poliyana, five kilometers behind Leibstandarte, which remained at the leading edge of the assault. During this night, the rest of Leibstandarte’s force would complete its turn away from Oboyan and catch up, bringing the division to full strength. Hopefully the trailing regiments would be accompanied by more repaired tanks. This would allow the division to send a panzergrenadier regiment across the road and rail mound in the morning to assist Das Reich with its progress through the defended forests and villages there.

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

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

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

Staff cars.

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

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

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

‘Captain de Vega, sir?’

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

‘What is it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luis inclined his head. ‘Major.’

‘Captain de Vega.’ Grimm spoke, lowering his kerchief for a moment. He looked out the car window at the dim silhouettes of Soviet tanks across the slope.

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

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

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

‘Thank you, Major.’

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

‘Yes, Major.’

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

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘You have been put up for several medals.’

Luis said nothing. It was good to hear but this was not the point of the midnight visit.

Grimm’s eyes flagged. Some new defeat was in them, something not on the map table.

‘I understand, son.’ Grimm aimed a finger at Luis’s chest. ‘I know how important it is to you. And you’ve done well.’

Luis was impatient. He cocked his head and prodded. ‘But?’

Grimm did not hesitate anymore.

‘But the Americans invaded Sicily this morning.’

Luis was rocked more by this statement than by any shell that had hit his Tiger. The news pierced him, his chances for redemption.

Grimm continued. ‘Over three thousand ships. The American landing force consisted of eight divisions. Reports say that some of Mussolini’s troops helped the Americans unload their transports.’

And what about Citadel?’ Luis forced himself to keep his voice even. ‘Is the battle called off?’

‘Not yet. Hitler’s waiting to see the progress at Prokhorovka. There’s no more movement in the north. Model’s been completely stopped there. The same on the Oboyan road, Hoth is at a standstill dealing with attacks on his left flank. The only chance to reach Kursk is here. With you and the SS through Prokhorovka. I came to see your positions for myself. And to tell you. Privately. This is not information for anyone else. You’re the only one, Captain, who I am certain will fight harder because of it. The rest of the men will find out when they have to. You understand.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

Grimm ran a hand across his pate, the bristles of his cropped rim of hair sizzled under his palm. He looked again out at the dim battlefield. There were plenty of knocked-out Soviet tanks there. If Hitler could come and see for himself, Luis thought, he would never stop Citadel. We’re still strong, we’ll beat them. Let us fight. Let me fight.

‘Two or three days, Captain,’ Grimm said. ‘That’s all the Führer is going to wait. If there’s no breakthrough at Prokhorovka, he’ll put a stop to this. So.’

‘I will do my duty, Major.’

Grimm smiled again, insipid and still eager to please. ‘I’ll keep an eye on your block, Captain la Daga.’

Luis wanted to lean forward from his seat and snarl at the tip of Grimm’s fat nose. Climb into my Tiger with me, you tubby slab of shit, keep an eye on me there! Tell Hitler to let me fight!

Luis took one breath to calm himself, he drew in the safe stink from this officer, his sweat and resignation, the cleanliness of his game board in Belgorod. Luis knew his lips were tight, clamped against his anger at the news and the man who’d brought it, even his kindness in doing so. You’ve done well, Captain. But not well enough. I thought you’d like to know. You’ve got two days to take Prokhorovka. The Americans, you understand. Out of my hands.

The staff car started and flung on its lights. Luis watched it pull off the road and circle to return west, followed by its entourage, except for the sidecar motorcycle. He waved the rider off. The courier nodded, then followed Grimm.

Luis had hours left to him before morning. He’d walk up the long hill and count the dead Russian tanks.

July 11 0540 hours the Karteshevka-Prokhorovka road

Dimitri had never seen this much traffic. He moved the General at a slow walk, the pace of the thousands of men and trucks ambling east with him over the road and in the fields on all sides this morning. He hadn’t shifted past second gear in more than four hours, most of that spent jerking along in first. He’d grown impatient with the bumpy ride and the grinding transmission. He wanted to stand up and yell at the shuffling soldiers and spewing trucks, You’re in the way of a tank! A tank! With a shell or two in their tails they’d clear the road fast enough and let the General speed through.

Dimitri was simmering, warming and angry since sunup inside the empty tank. The rest of the crew rode outside on the deck in the fresh air, Valentin with his new lieutenant’s stars, admired by Pasha, and poor Sasha, a cliche of the wounded patriot soldier with white gauze lapped around his head. Dimitri felt used. Last night rolling, crawling, with the metal tide along the road, Valentin’s boots propped out of habit on his shoulders, he felt like a horse, blinkered and reined and ridden. For the first several hours he’d muttered to himself that he was a Cossack and a hetman and many things that were not a horse, but his mumblings had been shaken out of him by the long ride in first gear and by no one to listen; now he stared out his open hatch, out of grim eyes at the exhaust smoke pouring from beneath the truck bumper directly in front of him.

A major reshuffling of forces was taking place. It seemed every able-bodied man, truck, and tank was being crammed into the area around Prokhorovka. The General had picked up a dozen hitchers since sunrise. Valentin had told the crew they were headed southeast to join the defense of Prokhorovka. They were going to hook up with the 32nd Tank Brigade of the 211th Tank Corps. Dimitri had heard nothing about this unit. What had they done in the battle of Kursk? They were Steppe Front units, reserves. He had been running under enemy gun sights for a week now, he’d carted Valentin and his cannon in front of a hundred German tanks, Sasha had depleted fifty ammo belts, Pasha had reloaded his bins a dozen times. He’d got them all out safe every time. Now they were going to join a brigade of sixty tanks that didn’t even have a scuff on the paint yet. Valentin told them the 32nd Tank Brigade was arrayed directly beside the Prokhorovka road, right in the Germans’ route. Valya was proud, calling it the place of honor. Pasha nearly shit himself hearing this. Another road to defend, Dimitri thought, as if this were some specialty they’d developed. More like a curse, he thought. He swished his tongue but found no moisture, just road dust and ire.

He pulled the General out of line, off the road. He shut down the engine and stood in his hatch, pushing past a thicket of strange legs and muddy boots to shove himself out of the opening and drop to the ground. He looked up at his tank, it was scabbed with soldiers clinging to every open spot. He stomped into the field away from the road and the endless line of creeping vehicles, all of them going too slow. Behind him men called Hey and What’s he doing? Dimitri walked far enough into the field to not hear them, he stood looking north into open land where a horseman could clip along nicely. Out of the south the booms of combat lobbed over his head.

He expected his son, waiting with his back turned. If he sends Sasha he’s a coward, Dimitri thought. Come yourself.

Finally boots kicked through the crop rows, coming to him. He had swearing ready and his tired hands were balled.

‘Papa.’

Dimitri turned. Pasha and Sasha watched from the deck of the tank. Valentin was bareheaded. Dimitri pulled his own padded helmet off and dropped it on the ground. He ran both hands through his damp hair, grimacing beneath his mitts.

‘Papa, I’ve got to ask you to stop this.’

So easy a trap I could lay for him, Dimitri thought. I could demand, Stop what? Make him say it. Stop being insubordinate, Papa. Stop being a danger. Stop being unpredictable. Then I can yell back.

‘Why am I so mad at you all the time, Valya?’

Valentin knew the answer, and he said it.

‘We’ve traded places, Papa. You weren’t ready for it. That’s all.’

Dimitri had seen a wife die. Comrades skewered or shot. A powerful father wasted to illness and gone too young. He’d seen a man’s life and knew he should not have this as his saddest moment. But there it was, and it seemed so wrong to be this crushed at something a boy said.

Is this what happens to every father, at war or not? Does this moment hurt all fathers this much? When did I do this to mine? Did I stare him down like a dog that got too old to hunt?

Dimitri gazed at the ground and waited for it, the notion to slap his son. Then he lifted his eyes to his son’s face.

Valentin had not moved or flinched. His son stood with the backdrop of a mural behind him, men and machines rushing to the defense of Russia, to bar the road to Prokhorovka; this Lieutenant Berko and his crew had fought in the worst of the battles for Kursk and now hurried to fight in another. Dimitri’s hands relaxed. He chuckled at himself. No matter how little else was left to him, either pride or time, he was the father of a Soviet hero. In a Soviet country, this was not so bad a thing.

When will he know me, Dimitri wondered? Never. The roads separated too soon, my son’s and mine, there was not enough time, the war and the Communists came too swiftly. This boy learned the sword and now the tank. But Valya does not know his father, as I did not know mine until now. Perhaps that’s just how it works. We do not know, that’s why wars are fought, great wars like the one in the river valley at the end of this road, infinitesimal wars like the one in the space between the locked eyes of father and son. And perhaps we will not know God the Father until too late also. Dimitri sighed for all this stumbling around blind. What a design, to make things this way, pieces that will never fit, what sort of machine is life to be like that? That’s why it runs so rough. Before his sigh was done it became a good laugh. This was Dimitri’s gift, the true Cossack’s gift, to switch sides nimbly, to pick the winner and go with him.

He eased beside Valentin, and laid his arm across the boy’s shoulders. He gave Valya’s frame a squeeze, pleased to feel muscle and grit there.

‘Have you heard from your sister?’

‘No. She hasn’t written in weeks.’

‘I’m sure she’s alright.’ Dimitri turned his son away from the free northern fields, back to the waiting tank and the clustered, diesel-choked road to Prokhorovka. ‘She doesn’t have me to deal with. Come on, Lieutenant. Put your arm around me. I’m just your father.’

Valentin’s hand did not go around Dimitri. The boy said, ‘Papa, let me go.’

Dimitri took down his arm, as ordered.

July 11 0900 hours Voroshilov

After the Psel river bridge at Voroshilov, the traffic thinned. They were all now within the lines of 5th Guards Tank Army. Vehicles and infantry scattered south into the fields to reinforce their assigned units. The sounds of combat batted in the air, rising on smoke. The Germans were trying hard to move up north of the Psel, to keep abreast of their advance on Prokhorovka south of the river. More soldiers Valentin had picked up jumped off the General after crossing the bridge. Open-bedded trucks waited for them. The soldiers packed themselves in and were jolted across the valley grasses to be set like pikes in the Germans’ way. Sasha, Pasha, and Valentin dropped back into their seats. Valentin stood in his turret. Dimitri kept the General stroking ahead southeast on the road, pushing them through a ground-hugging haze of artillery smoke. The guns were firing from a nearby hill into the alley of land west of Prokhorovka, where the battle with the SS waged.

Last night’s rains and high winds had given way to a morning of rising heat and humidity. Cloud cover clamped them down to the earth like a hen’s feathered rear. Dimitri’s goggles fogged on him but he couldn’t pull them down because of the dust he drove into. He refused to lower his hatch, that would make him too dependent on Valya’s directions or the boy lieutenant’s damned boots. Dimitri had accepted his place in the confusing schemes of life and war, but this did not mean he relished it.

At mid-morning Valya ordered him off the road. Ahead, a handful of T-34s did the same and led the way south. Dimitri got in behind them and finally let the General bolt. He shook Valya out of his turret hatch and made the boy settle his rear into the safety of his seat. Five tanks, all scarred T-34s, raced over the fields. Dimitri pulled even with them and they ran side by side, no one eating dust this way. They passed an immense concentration of weapons and men, all of them on the move or digging in. Trucks towed artillery pieces into long lines and tiers by caliber, tankers hollowed out trenches for hull-down firing positions, pyramids of artillery rounds waited to be stashed, soldiers shoveled out foxholes to stand their ground. Dimitri kept the throttle open. The five T-34s shot past rifle brigades, tank brigades, a regiment of airborne looking sharp and determined marching forward, every one of them fresh and unblooded. Every man they passed turned their way, to watch the five veteran tanks fly forward, trailing dust plumes like wild stallions.

One by one the tanks peeled away, finding their units, until only the General Platov was left. Valentin’s boot low on his neck told Dimitri to slow down. He shifted back reluctantly, clinging to the thrill of rushing over flat ground and rippling stalks of grass, carefree and racing alongside steely comrades. It felt good to fly.

The General passed a crossroads town. This was Prokhorovka. The place wasn’t much more than a collection of shanties and outbuildings, a handful of barns, a granary, a meeting hall. A railroad track ran atop an embankment into the center. The town, like every civilian area in the battle zone, was overtaken by guns. On all sides Prokhorovka was bracketed by armor and artillery facing west, a hundred tanks, twice that number in field pieces, a hundred times that in men and rifles. Dimitri couldn’t help but think if these machines of war had been tractors, if the host of soldiers digging the black steppe had been plowing, if this need to fight were instead a will to harvest, Prokhorovka would be a kingdom of plenty. Breaking things was always fun, but when the battles were over Dimitri rode away from the pieces and forgot them. What made him wistful now looking at Prokhorovka sliding behind him was the waste, for this town, for himself, for all these young men, because what will count in the end for them will be not what they destroyed but what they planted. Crops. Children. The things a man doesn’t ride away from.

When he was called to a halt, he shut the General down. The other three climbed out of the tank. Sasha leaned his head into the driver’s hatch and said, ‘Come on, Dima, let’s get some air,’ but Dimitri kept his seat. Freshly painted tanks moved on all sides, skidding to take up positions. The air Sasha wanted to breathe was clogged with metallic noise. This place was so far from where Dimitri wanted to be. He wanted nothing of these new comrades or this task.

Five kilometers ahead, an awful battle roiled, kicking up roars and billows of smoke, the smell on the breeze was explosives. The battle raged around a spot of high ground beside the Prokhorovka road, and for a small state farm below it. From the looks of things at this short distance, ample Soviet forces were keeping the Germans at bay for the morning. But this was the SS out there. Dimitri knew his time would be tomorrow, with the 32nd Tank Brigade around him and the four, five, six hundred other Russian tanks in more waiting units, when the SS broke through and came for Prokhorovka.

He stood out of his hatch into the buzzing day. He scanned the land corridor before him, five kilometers wide between the Psel and the rail mound, searching for the place where he would fight. If he had a horse he would ride the terrain, know the land before you trust it to be your ally. But there was only a slowly undulating steppe expanse here, wide and shallow balka valleys without features of advantage for either army, the earth would not choose sides here. Straight to the west rose the curtain of smoke and clamor, the opening fight for the hill and state farm. Opposite, in the east, looking on from the outskirts of Prokhorovka, Dimitri stood in his driver’s place.

In the middle, on the floor of a broad and shallow valley, set like a golden stamp in a great brown sheet, spread a field of sunflowers. These blooms turned their heads with the shifting light. Today they gaped right, then left, at warring nations. Tomorrow, Dimitri knew, there would be none of them standing at all.

July 11 1840 hours Oktyabrski state farm

‘Walk with me, Balthasar.’

The gunner rose from the ground on rubbery feet. No one but Luis in the Tiger crew had straightened his legs in over six hours. Luis stood aside until the gunner took his hands from the tank and was steady. The other three crewmen had sat up when Luis approached. They laid themselves out flat when Balthasar and Luis walked away.

Luis and the gunner strode off from the rest of the tanks in the company. Again Luis had brought them through another day of hard fighting without losing a tank. In fact, when the trailing elements of Leibstandarte caught up to the rest of the division in the early morning, they brought with them six more Mark IVs, two had been assigned to Luis. Now, at the end of his fourth day commanding the company in combat, they numbered sixteen tanks.

Luis and Balthasar walked through the remains of Oktyabrski. A gray snow of ash filtered down from the smoldering timbers of barns and silos. A dead Russian lay face up with his hands and legs spread wide, blown there to the ground, a teenager, and he looked to Luis like a boy making a snow angel in the spilling ashes. This was a cold image, Luis did not like it. It reminded him of Leningrad, where he took his wound.

He opened his mouth to speak to Balthasar, then thought better of it. He would have to shout to be heard in this dirt lane, crowded with grenadiers flooding in to take positions in the rubble. Tanks and armored troop carriers careered around the debris piles, and medical wagons collected SS dead and wounded. All the Red corpses were hoisted onto trucks and dumped out on the steppe to be burned. The snow-angel boy was so stiff he was lifted and swung up to the truck like a hammock.

Luis walked Balthasar toward the western edge of the state farm. He smelled himself and the gunner. Their odors were identical, acidy from the backwash of day-long cannon fire, a sort of spoiled citrus tang of sweat and chemical stained their skin and uniforms. The smell of mechanized combat was on them. Luis wanted a postcard of this, to send to his father, and one to Hitler.

The two stood where it was quieter now. They gazed over the terrain they’d seized today. Leibstandarte had clawed another five kilometers closer to Prokhorovka, lunging at first light northeast out of Komsomolets state farm. The division attacked across a wide front, spanning all across the land corridor, from the edge of the Psel to south of the rail mound. The Russians fought hardest on this ground, defending the state farm in the middle. When his panzer company rolled up to attack, they came up short in front of the biggest antitank ditch he could imagine, the proportions were remarkable, the thing was as wide and deep as a river. This underscored Luis’s loathing for the Soviet peoples, revived his thinking of them as drones, to dig such a thing was primitive. His armored attack was thwarted for the morning. This angered him more for the hissing in his head, the sound of the Führers draining patience for this misadventure in Russia. The assault was redirected until bridging equipment could be brought up to cross the giant ditch. An hour later, after regrouping, Luis’s company came at Oktyabrski from the northwest, where the Reds were expecting them. A barrage of machine-gun fire sprang out of the farm buildings, catching the accompanying grenadiers by surprise; even behind tanks they couldn’t advance. Luis would not move ahead into the sting of the dug-in Red infantry without ground troops – this was how Thoma had lost so many tanks – and the attack stalled again. Luis grew grimmer in his commander’s seat, counting minutes, knowing that Hitler in Berlin counted minutes and the swelling number of Americans on the beaches in Sicily. Stukas were called in to cover the pioneers bridging the tank moat in front of the state farm. Finally, at 1400 hours, the ditch was spanned. Every tank of Leibstandarte attacked at once. Ground was gained a meter at a time. Armored transports hauled a full regiment of panzergrenadiers to the leading edge of the battle, Luis’s tanks provided cover and firepower, and together they plowed into the defenders of Oktyabrski. The Reds sent out a paltry rank of T-34s to deflect the assault; a dozen were shot out of their number in the first ten minutes. Balthasar got three of them. The Tiger gunner showed an uncanny hand now with the speed and agility of the Soviet tanks, they didn’t dodge him so well anymore. The state farm fell twenty minutes ago, and with it the last high ground before Prokhorovka, Hill 252.2. Leibstandarte claimed twenty-one Soviet tanks destroyed.

The division was called to a final halt for the day. Again the flanking forces had lagged, leaving Leibstandarte exposed in the middle. The attack on Prokhorovka was forced to wait until morning, to allow Das Reich and Totenkopf to pull alongside. Luis looked backward, at the seven more kilometers they’d captured, up from Komsomolets state farm. The land was darkened and shredded by fighting. Rear elements of the division crept over the plain in the late-afternoon light, bringing food and ammunition and bandages to the warriors walking under the drifting ash of the state farm. It seemed a mighty thing to have done, to have taken this ground back from the Russians. Luis wanted Hitler to stand here with him and see it, he would present Hitler with this present of a swath of Russia, and promise him more.

But the Americans. How can Hitler ignore them? They’re an unknown quantity, an industrial behemoth let loose now in the war in Europe. What kind of fighters will the Americans be? Luis knew the Yanks were in the Pacific tangling with the Japanese, but nothing else. He stared over the churned patch of Russia he’d conquered that day. Japan, America, Italy – those nations were far away and without weight, they were not here in the smoke of killed tanks out on that plain and the burned state farm behind him. He could not conceive that what Grimm had told him would come true, that Hitler would lose his nerve and take this away from him. He did not believe that tomorrow the SS would fail to ram forward another seven kilometers and take Prokhorovka. What could the Reds throw at him tomorrow that they had not thrown today?

Luis raised a palm over the captured plain. His hand floated in the air above the crushed grasses and turned soil, some black smoke plumes. This hand, frail and pale as chalk, did this to the land.

‘It seems like a lot, doesn’t it?’ he asked Balthasar.

‘Yes, sir. It does.’

Luis lowered his hand.

‘It’s not enough.’

Balthasar made no answer. Luis was not curious for what the gunner’s silence said about the man’s reasons for fighting. Probably he’s like the rest, Luis thought. He’s here because he believes in Germany more than he believes in himself. Luis couldn’t be more different. He didn’t want to stop the advance because Germany might get a bloody nose. He’d cover Germany in blood if he could. Russia, too. And Italy and America. Luis alone would know when there had been enough.

‘We can take Prokhorovka,’ he said. ‘Did you know I used to be a bullfighter?’

Balthasar showed nothing of the disdain the Nordic peoples held for the barbarism of bullfighting. The gunner was still a very young man, he’d likely never been far from his own town in Germany before the war swept him up, never known a Spaniard. Balthasar probably thought all Spaniards were bullfighters.

‘No, sir.’

‘I can read what a bull is thinking. I can tell which way he’s going to jump. My father taught me this. Having my life depend on it taught me, too. And I can tell you, Balthasar, about the Russians. I can read them. We can beat them. They know it. All their attacks are from the flanks. They’re afraid to come right at us. They nibble at our sides. Every one of their direct assaults has been weak. They’re defensive. We’ve bled them, Balthasar, we’ve bled them almost to where they’ll fall. We’ve got to go forward. We’ve got to push the blade in deeper.’

Luis and Balthasar looked west, at the depth the blade was already into the Russian heart. It was not enough.

‘Tomorrow,’ Luis promised.

This sun over the conquered western corridor went down in the time of Luis’s mind and came back up tomorrow, glowing red in the east, chasing stars, beginning the end. And there it was again, the partisan’s heart beating in his hand. And there were bulls’ hearts throbbing there, too. But the sensation was different, not only the pump of one man’s stolen heart and the ended lives of animals but the pulse of all Russia, right in Luis’s fist. He held his hand up, cupped as though holding a real heart, and looked into his curled palm.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said again, ‘we’ll take Prokhorovka.’

July 12 0410 hours with the 32nd Tank Brigade 2 kilometers west of Prokhorovka

The commissars surfaced at first light. They came with bottles of vodka.

The cartons in their grips rang with knocking glass. The boxes sounded to Dimitri like the bells of fishermen on the Black Sea, when the boats came home from a day’s haul and called all to the docks who wanted to buy fresh catch. The commissars spread out among the tank brigade, ringing the men awake in the charcoal morning. They wore the same mustard uniforms as infantrymen, but with many medals and ribbons pinned to their tunics, and with only a sidearm slapped on their belts. The politrooks set the cardboard cartons down at their feet. They began their own calls, fishermen themselves, baiting with the vodka.

Dimitri had been awake for hours, watching lightning ripple over the steppe. He’d listened to the night workers out on the battlefield, to the thumps of explosives as engineers blew up disabled T-34s too damaged to be towed away and repaired. Sappers crawled to the front to lay mines where German tanks were certain to come today. From the other direction came the logistics corps bringing up food and ammo, lubricants and diesel. Dimitri eyed the laden commissars, he was the first to traipse to the nearest one. He leaned down to take a bottle by the neck out of the box. The bottle was corked by a bit of rag.

‘Courage!’ the commissar bellowed at Dimitri, as though the two were on opposite sides of a field. Dimitri held the bottle up by the neck like a chicken for dinner.

‘Courage,’ he echoed and walked off.

Sasha appeared from somewhere in the night – Dimitri stayed close only to his tank, casting his senses out to the battlefield, to the dark sunflower field on the valley floor – and slid down beside him. The boy was freckled and orange-cast and wrapped white, grinning bravely through his pain. Dimitri handed the warm glass over. The two sat listening to the keening commissar.

A crowd of the tankers gathered around the man, perhaps a hundred. They came for the bottles and stayed in the commissar’s net. None of these boys had been in the fight for Kursk yet, Dimitri could see it on them. They were frightened and needy of the commissar’s calls for bravado, they did not know yet what they would do today. Great things, the commissar told them, great things, and Dimitri knew this to be true, because living through today or dying in these flowers and grainfields would be remembered as great.

Dimitri and Sasha shared the bottle, neither speaking when the commissar called into the center of his gathered ring the young lieutenant from 3rd Mechanized Corps and the battle for the Oboyan road, the commander of the tank General Platov. The Germans were stopped on the road to Oboyan and they would not pass to Prokhorovka, the Lieutenant told them. He was cheered with Urrabs, clapping, and lifted bottles. Thick Pasha was one of the applauders, his coveralls dirtier than any of the others standing around him.

Valentin reached into his breast pocket for a folded sheet of paper. This was something official, a communiqué from headquarters. A new duty, Dimitri thought. Splendid. We don’t have enough to do today.

‘We will face a powerful German force today,’ Valya announced, rattling the page as if the paper meant something that could equal a man’s life. ‘We have orders not to budge away from the Prokhorovka road. There will be no retreat today. There will be only victory.’

The men cheered again. They don’t know, Dimitri thought, and turned to see the same high spirits on Sasha’s tired face. The cheers put a mad taste in his mouth and he sipped more vodka to wash it away. Valentin let the tankers roar their approval that they should die today. Dimitri paid little attention, hearing nothing new from the mouth of a Soviet.

Valya told them what was on the sheet, what they would be facing today: three highly trained and veteran SS divisions. These were men and weapons diverted from the assault on the Oboyan road where they could not break through. Now they would try the way through Prokhorovka. They will have with them fifty-seven assault guns and two hundred and thirty-six tanks. Ninety-one of the tanks will be Mark IVs, and fifteen will be Mark VI Tigers.

Where did the Red Army get these facts and figures, Dimitri marveled, how could they be this exact? He hoisted his bottle and tapped the lip of it to an invisible drinking partner, toasting whoever was responsible for this kind of precision. That’s why we’re here, he thought, the Soviets have lined up every tank and gun they could scrounge in front of the damn SS. That kind of information was worth its weight in gold. Not that it will save any lives, but it was damn impressive.

Valya described the size and power of the Tiger tank. Red Army Headquarters had determined that a priority target for the battle of Prokhorovka was the Mark VI Tigers. Every Soviet tank was to find and wipe out every Tiger they could. Valentin reminded the men of their training, to approach the Mark VI from the sides, to attack it with numbers in your favor, to aim for the treads first to disable the mammoth, then move in for the kill.

Valentin pocketed the paper. This brought the commissar back to his side. Another, final round of urrahs rang from the crowd for the young hero of Oboyan, and soon, of Prokhorovka.

July 12 0630 hours

He was in his driver’s seat when the first German fighters swooped past. His head ached a little from the dawn vodka. The day grew fat with humidity and he sat swiping beads from his forehead, slinging them off his fingers out his open hatch. When he saw the first black blurs his hand froze, as though waving hello to them.

One flight of three fighters roared by wing-to-wing without firing a round, then were followed by another flight. The planes dove in low formation, then carved away into sharp banks. They were remarkably swift, beautiful even. Dimitri shook his headache at war in the sky; when he was a boy the skies were blue and black and gray, they were birds and constellations and mansions of cloud and the place where God lived. But never again would children know that kind of sky, war was in it now, and war was out on the ocean, too, and under the water, and one day it will be in the stars, he knew. Wherever men go, we’ll take death with us. Dimitri thought of Katya and imagined her a star pilot flying a machine he could not envision. A rocket, perhaps, free and fast like she always was.

Sasha burrowed up from his escape hatch between the treads. Behind, Pasha tumbled in the commander’s hatch, cursing the planes. Valentin, his other child, did not follow. He’s probably getting one last round of inspiration from the commissars, Dimitri decided. He ogled another line of streaking black Messerschmidts and was glad to be a throwback warrior, even riding a steel horse. This was his place; it was enough to know that these things in the sky and sea and one day the stars belonged to others. He was a Cossack plainsman and had lived all his days true to that.

The countermove arrived inside of a minute. Soviet Yak-9s and Lavochkin-5s swept in lower than the German fighters, not afraid of ground fire over their own troops, and climbed up into the Messerschmidts’ bellies. Like twists of smoke from two different fires they twined and rose off the ground, twirling around each other in a cyclone of wings, chattering machine-guns, and yawping cannons. Dimitri watched them rise, taking their swiping engine noises with them into a backdrop of din and plummeting pieces of themselves he figured would last all day. He scraped another film of sweat off his brow.

For the next hour he told Sasha what he saw in the sky. The boy sat with his chin to his thin chest. Pasha stood in Valentin’s commander’s hatch and watched the action high above for himself, unplugged from the intracom. Pasha did everything now with a stupid and sober eagerness, he’d become a hunting dog. Dimitri talked to Sasha because it kept the two of them from growing frightened. This morning they hadn’t refilled their resolve from the well of the commissar’s entreaties for courage. They’d filled themselves with vodka instead and were left now with only what they’d started their day with, each other and the remnants of the drink.

Stukas blared their banshee sirens in dives over the villages, copses, and orchards where much of the Soviet armor was lagered. Dimitri didn’t have to count the planes to know there were more than a hundred. This was a major commitment of air power to Prokhorovka, a bad, bad sign of how badly the Germans wanted it today.

‘The Stukas look like buzzards. Big slow buzzards. The trees are burning around Storozhevoe. And some of the wheat fields along the river are on fire.’

Sasha nodded once in a while, or his head lolled, Dimitri could not be certain. Either way, Dimitri kept up his narrative for the both of them. Behind his head, Pasha’s boots stamped whenever a German or Red plane plummeted out of the air battle. Waves of German bombers swept out of the western horizon, matched soon by a greater number of Soviet bombers from the east. Dimitri told this to Sasha. The boy rubbed his closed eyes.

The twin flying armadas rained explosions and shards of themselves across the Prokhorovka corridor on both land armies. The planes scored the morning sky with fireballs that looked small from so far below but must have been fearsome and sudden at their altitude. On the ground, flames and haze from their bombardments began to obscure the sunlight that was already dimming to encroaching clouds. Dimitri looked down from the fury overhead to the sunflower field, two kilometers from where he sat. The giant yellow swath scared him. He did not know what he would find this day in those tall, searching flowers. He did not know his place in there.

At 0815 hours, Soviet artillery opened up. For fifteen minutes thousands of field guns pounded pre-selected positions where enemy armor was believed to be gathered. Dimitri knew the preparation barrage would have only a limited effect on the Germans; likewise the fleet of planes high above, bombarding selected areas. This battle in the Prokhorovka corridor was not a set piece, not a chessboard collision, it had become a living, flexing clash between mobile forces. These were cavalries on the move against each other. They would not be fought and defeated from the air, only by foes on the same level, tank to tank. Dimitri started his engine. The General cranked quickly and sounded eager this morning, a tad jealous to have been left to sleep through so much clamor of guns and bombs until now. He checked his gauges, everything ran a little elevated. Sasha lifted his head to the revving motor. The look on his face held the same momentum as the General’s excited humming, Let’s go.

The artillery fusillade lasted fifteen minutes. The last voice was not the deep boom of cannons but screeching Katyusha rockets, sheets of them flashing overhead and screaming, scythes of fire ripping the air. In seconds they were gone. The last of the explosions rumbled out of the haze that obscured the western fields and began to dim the sunflowers.

Dimitri turned to see Valentin’s legs drop through the hatch. The boy arrived cat-nimble and coiled, looking ready to spring right back out the hole over his head. There was no fear in him, no hesitation, he was as impatient as the General to light out into the fight and the unblemished sunflower field. He nodded to his father. He clearly meant the gaze to mean so much; Be strong, Papa. Believe, Papa. Be your best today, Papa.

Outside Dimitri’s open hatch, the 32nd Tank Brigade surged forward. Engines roared, fumes spat, treads spun, but this was different, Dimitri knew in a flash. This wasn’t a move to counter the Germans coming for Prokhorovka, this was not another reaction in defense of the road or the rail or the corridor.

This was a Russian attack.

He shifted the General into gear to join the speeding sweep of machinery into the fields. The tank rattled in his hands. Over the intracom, Valya’s voice rose. The lieutenant shouted to his crew the signal phrase he and the other tank commanders must have been given from their leaders, to set loose their armor and the day’s fate.

‘Stal,’ the boy shouted, with one boot tapping the syllable into Dimitri’s neck.

‘Stal! Stal!’

Steel! Steel! Steel!

July 12 0840 hours one kilometer northwest of Oktyabrski

Sixty-seven tanks of the panzer regiment crept forward, smashing aside skinny scrub trees, branding their treads into the grassy plain. From his cupola, Luis eyed the sixteen tanks of his company, moving in the heart of the assault. He intended to keep his tanks tightly formed, not only to concentrate his firepower but to display his command. Today, everything would be watched and recalled. The four platoons of his company held their wedges well, they did not fray even dodging the smoking craters from the Soviet bombardment. The tank drivers didn’t mind plowing over every Russian thing in their way.

All the tanks of Leibstandarte were massed and surging toward Prokhorovka in an armored thrust three kilometers wide. Totenkopf and Das Reich, in their sectors north and south, were doing the same right now, all of them plunging at Prokhorovka in one concerted, lethal strike. The metallic clatter of so much rolling armor thrilled Luis. He stared down the long barrel of his cannon, watching the steppe slip toward him, then beneath and behind him. The tanks on all sides were devouring land without resistance, knocking down grain stalks, gaining momentum and daring. Luis felt none of his usual hunger right now, his gut seemed satisfied by the powerful SS pack on every side of him. He took a moment to believe in the healing power of conquest, that he might never be hungry again if he could just gobble enough of Russia today. He might sit in Spain this year and chew on these days, wash them down with wine under a warm mist from the fountains.

He thought of the Americans in Sicily this morning. Were they moving faster than he was? He saw Italian fountains, with Americans toasting themselves in the warm spray.

‘Radio. Stay tight. Keep alert.’

‘Ja.’ Luis listened in while the radioman repeated his command to the company.

‘Balthasar.’

‘Fertig.’ Ready.

Two hundred meters ahead, the grainfields wrinkled into a lip, disguising a gradual downward slant. Luis stood in his Tiger’s cupola and surveyed the coming terrain. An hour ago a regiment of fifteen hundred grenadiers had begun their assault over this rise and into the valley below. Right away, they’d encountered strong Soviet infantry defending the ridgeline. After thirty minutes of fierce exchange, the Reds were shoved back. Luis’s panzer regiment was called in to support the grenadiers’ advance through the basin. If this valley could be taken, it would open a western attack lane directly to Prokhorovka, only two kilometers away. Leibstandarte threw all its tanks into this thrust.

The sounds of small-arms fire sprouted from the hidden valley. Luis and the panzer regiment came carefully up to the ridgeline, sixty-seven cannons pointing and trigger ready. The strength of the Russian defenders beyond the slope was unknown. Every tank slowed, every driver stole up to the rim to peer into the bowl.

The first Mark IVs reached the ridge, climbed, then slipped over the edge. Luis watched them cleave paths into shrubs and twisty branches, then sink slowly away down the slope. The first tanks of his own platoon passed the ledge, rose as though coasting over the swell of a wave, then tilted downward. His Tiger was next. The whine of his cannon elevating caught his attention, he watched the long barrel lift. Balthasar was clever; the gunner was not going to head down a slope with his weapon depressed. He wanted the gun up where he could defend the rest of the ridgeline above their heads.

The Tiger came to the ledge. The valley below was squarish, not deeply carved but broad. It opened west, draining down to the Psel. Two villages lined the riverbank there, Prelestnoe and Petrovka -the map room was always in Luis’s head. The slopes to the north and east leading into the valley were just like the one he was about to descend, all three were weedy and untended. But sprawling over the valley floor, filling it from the river villages to the foot of the bordering slopes, was an immense sea of bright, blossomed sunflowers. The valley walls cupped the gold like hands cradling a gigantic, shining medallion.

Luis gazed in wonder at the vast field of yellow. He did not forget this would be a battleground. But the omen was clear to him, the metaphor of the golden badge too plain to be ignored. His knife hand throbbed, he extended it behind the long, reaching cannon, as if to seize the prize.

The roar of a plane engine split the mists overhead. Luis dropped his hand and his imaginings and ducked into the cupola. He’d forgotten about the air battle raging on the other side of the smoke from artillery and the burning fields, the sounds of the dogfights were smothered on the ground by the rattle of moving armor.

Wings sliced out of the haze. The plane was a German scout flying parallel to the Leibstandarte line advancing into the valley. Small canisters tumbled out of an open window in the cockpit. The cans hit the ground and a great froth of purple smoke spewed from each all along the ridgeline.

This was the warning signal for tanks.

Luis looked left across the valley, to the river. He snatched his head around to the right, toward the railroad mound and road. Walls of violet smoke wafted everywhere.

The Reds. Remarkably, the Russians had chosen this moment to start a massive armored offensive. They’d picked the same time to attack, and the same ground, as the SS.

Luis stared into the purple cloak floating on the slope before him. He could not see through it into his yellow valley. The blowing, reddish billows made him angry. Had they taught the Russians nothing, were the Soviets this stupid to come in their Asiatic numbers again and again to be cuffed and killed every time? Luis hadn’t noticed but his Tiger had come to a stop. The rest of the panzer regiment was halted, as well. The scout plane powered away to the east, all his canisters puffing on the ground. The plane’s engine faded and was replaced by the zings and pops of small-arms fire in the valley.

Luis chafed in his hatch, waiting for the order to proceed down the slope. The purple smoke did not seem to thin, it waved in their faces and stymied them. The volleys of gunfire thickened in the valley behind the curtain.

‘Driver,’ he said.

‘Ja.’

‘Forward.’

The Tiger was the first to move into the vapor. In seconds the other tanks in Luis’s company were no longer mesmerized, they lurched, keeping formation. Behind his company the rest of the regiment shivered alive to creak down the incline. Luis had moved on, piercing the color and stink of the canisters ahead of the others.

‘Balthasar.’

‘Fertig.’

The purple fumes parted, whipped by a breeze flitting off the river. Through fissures in the smoke, Luis caught strains of gold. His Tiger pushed on and downward. Then, with a suddenness that surprised him, the smoke was whipped away.

On all sides, his company rolled out of the shroud, emerging onto the slope above the immense sunflower field. The tall flowers seemed to reflect their blazing color onto the battle mists and the smoke drifting overhead. Luis recalled the childhood game of holding buttercups under his friends’ chins, to see if they liked butter. Luis cast his eyes to the right, at the easternmost slope where the sounds of small-arms fire erupted. The Red infantry regiment and the grenadiers were locked in their own battle there. The sunflower field beckoned, as it had done since he arrived in Russia.

He shook his head.

‘Trap,’ he muttered.

He raised his right arm high, and at the same time gave the order to the driver, then the radio, to halt. The command went out to the rest of the company, then was taken up by the other tanks of the regiment. The grating of treads ceased all along the slope. The flowers stood two hundred meters away, their heads turned east to the sun and the carnage.

Luis looked to the west, to the flatland stemming from the river.

It took him a moment to find them across the bright corner of the sunflowers, the petals so infected the light, but there they were: the first stab from the Soviet offensive into this nodding yellow valley. Three dozen T-34s, maybe more, flowed out of cover from the two villages on the riverbank. They’d been lagered among the buildings, out of sight, planning to hit the Germans in the flank the moment the panzers crossed into the field. Luis’s regiment would never have been able to turn fast enough into the assault. The T-34s were intended to hit hard and fast at the vulnerable sides of the Tigers and Mark IVs. There would have been chaos and destruction in the sunflowers, if Luis had not stopped on the slope.

His tanks retained enough of the high ground to have an advantage over the rushing Reds. Had the Russians timed their move better, had they held off another minute until Luis became lulled or impatient enough to enter the valley, their strategy would have worked, the wound would have been deep. But now Luis brought Balthasar to bear. Along the slope, the other gunners turned also to meet the attack.

‘Range.’

‘Eighteen hundred fifty meters. Closing.’

‘At will, gunner.’

Luis no longer specified which shells or targets to choose. The gunner and his loader knew when to use AP or high-explosive rounds. And Balthasar had an uncanny knack for identifying which of the Soviet tanks was the boldest.

Balthasar fired; the fifteen Mark IVs in his company followed. The rest of the regiment opened up. The collective roar was enormous! In one heartbeat the first rank of T-34s took the hits. A dozen of the sixty-seven rounds fired in the opening salvo found their marks. The field geysered on all sides of the rushing Reds. More than a kilometer away, Luis saw two Soviet turrets catapult into the air on jets of steam, going off like teakettles, their ammo lit up from the intense heat of the shells piercing their compartments. The Russians did not veer from the battering but pressed through the edge of the sunflowers, wheeling into the killing range of the handful of Tigers on the slope and inevitably into the reach of the Mark IVs’ smaller cannons. Inside a minute every Leibstandarte tank was blasting away at the T-34s. So much smoke issued from the barrage it became hard to pick the T-34s out of the sunflowers up to their fenders. The Red armor was swift, cutting through the flowers like razors shaving the long stalks down. They did not stop, rolling inside a thousand meters, then eight hundred meters, close-quarters fighting for tanks. The Russians charged to get inside their own killing distance, no matter the cost they paid to the SS guns raging away above their heads. The corner of the golden field they stormed across was marred again and again under raining shells and the cremation of metal and man. Luis stood in his hatch and marveled at the Russians, not for the first time, but he felt, finally, watching this unreasoning rush into his blazing cannons, that he fully understood them. They were unfeeling to fear, remorseless to loss. They were brutes, truly. Do they feel nothing of their own danger? How can they run at my cannons? Don’t they know what I will do to them the closer they come?

Ruin, Luis thought. I will ruin them with blood. I’ll gut them.

What will it take to make them give way?

Luis wanted, needed, what existed on the other side of them. The Russians stood in the path of his freedom from this wretched body, they kept him from Spain and the misting Ramblas fountains, away from hands that were not afraid to touch him. Luis wanted to scream the things that welled inside him, make them a cannon shot.

Give me Prokhorovka!

The pulse in Luis’s right hand urged at him. All his anger at the Russians and their refusal to stand aside was there in the fist. He slammed it onto the turret. The hand landed hard, not enough meat on it anymore to cushion the blow. The partisan in the hand would not stop wailing, the hundred dead bulls bellowed warnings to him. He narrowed his eyes at the nearest T-34, just six hundred meters away. The first ring of smoke puffed from the barrel of this hard-charging Russian tank, though Luis knew in another moment it was a dead tank, it ran straight into the sight of his own massive gun. Balthasar had the bastard Russian in his sights so close, the gunner was aiming straight down the barrel. Luis could not believe it when the Red shell hit his Tiger.

His feet were knocked out from under him with a tremendous clang. He slipped and fell into the hatch, slamming his chin against the cupola. He saw splinters of light and crumpled across the arm of his commander’s seat. He was aware of the main gun breech below his legs heaving back and spitting a smoky casing. No one turned to deal with him, his crew continued to load and move the main gun, idle the Tiger’s engine, wait for orders from him.

Yes, he thought, orders. He rubbed blood from under his split chin. He rolled the crimson slick between the fingers and thumb of the right hand, his knife hand. He stood in the cupola. The Russian tank that fired at him was dead. Its crew leaped out. Luis’s hull gunner fired the Tiger’s machine-gun at them and missed.

Luis pressed a hand under his bleeding chin. The wound hurt. A new throb began in his jaw. He was puzzled, confused: Were the dead partisan and the bulls moving out of his hand and into his head, flowing upstream through the gash? Fucking Russians, he thought. He shook his head, dazed. A loose tooth rattled in his jaw. He flipped blood onto the hatch cover, on top of Thoma.

‘Captain.’

Balthasar’s voice was tinny over the intracom, another spike in Luis’s head. He blinked at the golden expanse below.

‘What? Yes.’

Across the valley, sir.’

The sunflowers seemed to be turning their million eyes to him now. Luis winced to blot out their color and focus over their heads.

Pouring down the far slope, in a cataract of armor into the valley, came an entire army of Red tanks. Luis wondered if his vision was still blurred, there were so many.

July 12 0900 hours two kilometers west of Prokhorovka

Dimitri propelled the General into a brown, swirling silt of soil and crushed weeds, flung into the air, then flung again like balls swatted by children. With his driver’s hatch secured, his eyes were reduced to the pinched rectangle of world visible through the vision block. Left, right, and straight ahead – all he could find through the dust were flashes of leaden treads spinning the steppe into the air, and bright slivers of gold.

He barreled down into the valley he’d watched for a night and a long morning. He had no idea how many tanks were rolling with him down the long slope. He didn’t even know which units were alongside his brigade. It didn’t matter, the number of tanks was astounding. He kept his forehead rammed against the padded periscope browpiece and shifted into third gear. The General leaped. Valentin had ordered speed.

No one said anything. Dimitri could only snare a fast glance at Sasha, the downhill driving was too demanding right now. The boy bounced in his seat and tried to hold on tight, he looked like he was on a runaway horse. Valentin’s boots danced on Dimitri’s shoulders but that was from the rough ride. There was nowhere to turn. Charging T-34s were on all sides, at this pace a swerve would cause an accident in such a density of running tanks. The blind, vaulting charge into the valley chased Dimitri’s hangover. He kept his eyes nailed to the padded vision block.

The dust lessened. The sunflower field filled the panorama of his sight. Dimitri watched a dozen T-34s dive into the yellow sea. Long green stalks whiplashed and golden heads snapped under the collision. The tanks chopped out paths crashing through the wall of plants, the flowers fell aside like the wake of horses flailing into a river. He gunned the General forward. He closed on the great flowers, two hundred, one hundred, then fifty meters. The slope eased, the General leveled out and Dimitri smashed into the field.

In his vision block, sunflowers went down under his treads, clipped by his racing glacis plate. The flowers looked shocked to be hit like this, they flung out their leaves, turned their heads at the last moment, and fell, looking right into his eyes. We’re innocent, why do you do this? Crushed, we are crushed. Dimitri could make them no answer why. I have no answer for anything, he realized.

Valentin pressed his boot to the top of his soft helmet, a demand for more speed. Yes, alright, I have an answer for that. He mashed the clutch and shifted into fourth gear.

July 12 0905 hours sunflower field 3 kilometers west of Prokhorovka

Luis watched blood drip into his palm. The dot pooled in his hand. He waited, and another drop landed inside it, deepening it.

Luis wiped the blood on his trousers. He brought the hand back to his waist, cupped the fingers, and waited again, a little gutter for his blood. Balthasar announced another round was in the breech. Luis aligned his eyes with the long barrel, trying to guess which target the gunner had picked, an absentminded game. That Soviet assault had been cut down by a third but still they pushed through the corner of the field. Luis took only a small interest. Sixty-seven SS tanks stood on the high ground; only a few Mark IVs had even been nicked. The Reds shot on the move, sacrificing accuracy for speed. Luis did not duck inside the hatch before Balthasar’s next shell but kept his eyes down at his bloodstained palm. The cannon fired. Luis weathered the backwash of dirt and gases. The long gun whined to fix on another target among the closing Red tanks. Luis caught another drop in his palm.

He lifted his gaze to the far side of the valley, three kilometers away. The first line of T-34s dove into the sunflowers, leaving a black wake for the next wave, and the next. Luis paid no attention to the number of enemy tanks. They were sufficient, whatever their number, for a grand battle in these sunflowers this morning, minutes from now. The ticking of those eclipsing minutes seemed to come in his hand, his knife hand catching his blood. The beat was the patter of his own blood dribbling, tapping.

Russian T-34s closed from the left, maybe twenty of them remained, running hard. The Reds were paying a flaming wage for getting close enough to enter their own effective range, but in moments their shells would start to take the toll on the stationary SS tanks arrayed across the slope. In the valley, what looked like two regiments of Soviet armor coursed through the sunflower field.

Their lead formations were probably eighteen hundred meters away and charging at top overland speed.

We don’t have time to sit on this slope, he thought. We can’t stay still and take potshots, we’ll be up to our asses in Red tanks. They’ll slam into us, we’ll have no room to maneuver, with T-34s on three sides. And we will not go backward.

He watched the Red tanks crush the gold on their side of the valley, pushing into it fast, killing the color. They wore broken yellow petals and severed brown irises across their fenders in ugly spangles. This stoked something in Luis, the last bit of him, bleeding, maddened, hungry all of a sudden, blazing into hatred.

‘Radio.’

‘Ja.’

‘Tell the company to follow. Driver, forward. Mack schnell.’

Luis stood in the turret while the Tiger, his company, and then the entire regiment followed his command. Luis felt bold; the wound throbbed in his jaw but it was his throb, there was nothing foreign, no infestation of others in his soul now. He felt the black wooden block of the faraway map room slide forward, slide into this yellow valley that he knew was drawn blue and white on the giant map. He sensed the red blocks sliding to meet him across the table. But there were no long poles pushing them at each other. No, it was Luis making this happen. Let Breit and Grimm and Hitler and the Americans and the world watch Luis Ruiz de Vega go forward, and know that all of them, everything, were impelled by his will alone.

Slowly, then faster, the sixty-seven tanks of Leibstandarte gave up the ridge and lowered to the valley floor. The Soviet tanks merged into the field with the Germans. The battleground was level and bright, for these first moments a clean slate of gold.

Luis rode high on the Tiger. He watched the picket of sunflowers approach and succumb beneath his tank. He heard the crunch of snapping stalks and ignored it. He cared nothing for the field. It was land to be taken. They were Russian sunflowers. Not Spanish. Not gold.

July 12 0909 hours sunflower field 3 kilometers west of Prokhorovka

Dimitri could stand no more blindness, ramming his way through the green and saffron fatness of the sunflowers. He tore forward in the center of a great cavalry charge, into an enemy he had not caught sight of. Only Valentin in his turret could see where this Soviet attack was going, Dimitri could only tell how fast. Beside him, Sasha peered into his own vision block, blotted out by the same crashing field. The full-out sprint inside the General had turned claustrophobic, it was down to shuddering metal painted mint green, glass dials, levers, pedals, jiggling ammunition, diesel stink, unseeing men inside speeding steel. Who makes war like this, Dimitri marveled, who in the world? Only us, Russia. Always numbers, blindfolded numbers.

Dimitri had been catapulted into this valley like a lifeless cannonball, not a man entering battle, and he would have no more of it. Without an order from Valya, he angled the General to the right, easing sideways until he found the wake of another T-34 racing twenty meters ahead. He laid his own spinning treads into the tracks of that tank and followed, to see better where he was going. Valentin’s boots did not prevent him.

Dimitri blinked into his periscope. The tank ahead boosted flowers and fumes into the air, but for the first time in the attack he could see beyond his own fenders. The opposite slope of the valley dodged in and out of view. His visor shook with the jangling pace. In the glimpses he got of the far side, he noted tread scratches and shell craters in the brush and grasses there. Lots of German tanks had sat on that slope a minute before. How many? Several dozens, fifty at least, their marks covered the whole ridge. There’d been a short firefight. Perhaps the SS had withdrawn in the face of the Red onslaught, maybe they’ve gone back over the ledge in retreat. That’s why we’re hauling so fast, he thought. To catch the Germans. Maybe we won’t have to fight in this yellow hell.

His answer came in a trumpeting clout against his tank’s momentum, the sound like a lightning slash through the General’s cabin. His head and shoulders jolted to the impact, back into Valentin’s boots, he bit into his lip, his goggles were knocked askew. Both steering rods snapped out of his grip. The General careened. Smoke shot in around his hatch.

‘Papa!’ Valya’s scream was small in the turmoil.

Dimitri felt turned upside down, he could not stop blinking and gaping. Sasha was frantically trying to corral the free-flopping levers. Dimitri grabbed the boy by the scruff of his coveralls and flung him back into his own seat. He surrounded the levers with fists and gathered them in, grunting with the dizzy effort.

‘What happened?’ Pasha had been shouting this the whole time, Dimitri realized. ‘Are we hit? What happened?’

‘The shell deflected,’ Valentin answered. ‘It deflected. We’re alright. Everyone, lock in. Calm down. Papa?’

The round must have hit the slanted glacis plate right in front of Dimitri’s head. The armor held; the tread links the mechanic welded there had probably saved all their lives. Dimitri worked his tongue over his cut lip, the dash of pain yanked him alert. He regained control of the reeling tank.

‘Papa.’

‘What?’

‘They’re in the field with us.’

The tank’s ventilation system dragged at the strata of smoke between them. Sasha trained bugging eyes on Dimitri, then thrust them into his vision block. He put his hands on his machine-gun. The boy coughed and muttered, ‘Son of a bitch.’

Dimitri righted his goggles and muscled the tank forward, straight and fast as before. He waited for Valentin to give the order to stop, to train their big gun on whoever was shooting at them. But Valya kept the General charging ahead. Dimitri leaned in to his visor; he’d lost sight of the tanks ahead of him; after the blow the General must have spun out of formation. He was blind again, bolting through sunflowers.

Why are the Germans down in the valley with us? he wondered. They never do this, they don’t give up the advantage of their cannons. They’ve got discipline, they sit outside our range and pummel us, make us run under their stronger guns for a thousand meters before we can even squeeze off the first round. By the time we get close enough to hurt them, we’re slaughtered. Why are they in these damned flowers with us and not up on that ledge? Something is making them hasty. Something’s happened to their timetable.

Christ, Dimitri thought, Christ. This isn’t how tanks fight. How close are we going to get?

Again, as it had done moments before, the battle answered his question.

In his visor, the stalks ceased beating themselves against his sprinting tank, just for a second, then returned to their density. Moments later, they ceased again. The General rolled through gaps in the field.

Dimitri dropped his jaw to this new and worse shock.

No.

Those weren’t gaps.

In this instant, Valya’s boots struck him hard between the shoulders. Stop.

Dimitri’s heart clutched. He flung the General into lower gears, pressing with every bit of his strength on the brake.

Those were tank tracks, he realized. German tank tracks.

We’re side by side in the sunflower field. We’ve crossed paths. Over two hundred tanks.

My God.

Sasha mumbled, ‘Son of a…’

0913 hours

Many of the commanders in his regiment had lowered their hatches and secured themselves in for combat. Luis stood in the astounding morning. This was far too grand a sight to view through an eyepiece, locked inside a great, rumbling can, he thought. No, he’d leave the hatch cover up and let Thoma look with him. He lifted his wounded chin, still cupped in a pressing palm, to take it all in.

‘What do you think?’ he asked Thoma.

On every side of the great bowl of sunflowers, purple smoke drifted in kilometer-wide sheets. From Petrovka on the river, from Lutovo and Iamki south of the rail mound, the forest around Storozhevoe, across the river at Polezhaev, the air itself seemed to bleed. Russian and German forces vying for this little alleyway to Prokhorovka rammed into each other in unthinkable numbers. If all across the corridor the Russians insisted on the same two-to-one advantage they’d poured into this sunflower field, they’d marshaled five hundred Red tanks against the two hundred and thirty the SS’d brought, and every one of them, Red and German, shoe-horned into such a small arena! The smoke signals were everywhere! So must be the tanks.

Luis wanted to exult at the Russian charge. He wanted to shout, Come on! at the Reds, but he bit the bellow back, it imploded in his chest and fed his temper. The cut in his chin stung from sweat. He switched palms clapped against it, bloodying both hands.

In the valley now, his Tiger had fired no shots into the host of Russian tanks swarming and spreading his way. Luis held Balthasar in check for the first moments when it became plain the Soviets were not going to stop short and duel from their side of the sunflowers. He marveled at the charging Russians, watched the swaying yellow expanse between the Reds and his Tiger grow narrower by the second. Across a broad front, a hundred and more T-34s came nose-to-nose with the first ranks of Leibstandarte’s sixty-seven. The Reds ran so much faster than the German tanks, it was awesome to see at point-blank range. Not many rounds were exchanged in these initial seconds when the two forces mingled their armor. There was too much momentum, none dared to stop and take aim. Then the Russians ran right past Leibstandarte’s leading tanks, incredible! The two armies were like ghosts, passing into and through each other, a dreadful and unprecedented thing to see. Once contact was made, the ghosts slowed and stared at each other, both furious and invaded. Turrets whined now, treads squeaked to a halt, brakes and gears howled; to Luis the squealing sounds recalled the abattoir, screaming cattle, butchery, also the private whimpers of pain the bull makes, heard only by those close enough in the ring, the ones hurting him.

A hundred tanks of both sides came to a halt and fired their opening volleys. Many were broadside, aimed at enemies only-thirty, forty meters away. The toll in the initial minutes was vicious: cannons rang, gunsmoke spit, tanks erupted into flames. A haze enfolded the valley. A hundred other tanks kept moving, slicing through the flowers, dashing across crushed paths where Red or German tanks had just been a moment before. Luis watched a smoking T-34 tear past him through the flowers. He had no strategy to deal with this. He pressed his driver to continue forward, wading into the valley with his company wavering around him. He ordered them to stay close-knit but instantly saw how impossible that would be in this melee. One by one his Mark IVs peeled out of formation, engaged with one or several Soviet tanks at knife-fighting distance. Luis let them go.

Balthasar asked for firing instructions.

Luis made no response, just rode the Tiger deeper into the clanging flower field. A burning piece of a plane plummeted through the thickening battle fog; the battle for Prokhorovka was a tall thing, too, a giant rearing into the clouds.

He spun his gaze left and right, behind him. The purple smoke was all wafted away, no need for warning anymore, the battle was joined. Russian tanks ran everywhere, on every side. The vast yellow field was fast being crushed, ground down, and erased in curling paths under the two hundred tanks jockeying through the stalks. Dead hulks smoldered at the terminus of many of the routes. Balthasar asked again for instructions, where to shoot, when to begin fighting. The rest of the company was already engaged. Luis opened his mouth. Blood dribbled from his chin, he felt it separate and fall. He could not speak in the face of this titanic morning. He was shocked at himself.

He looked down at his SS uniform, glistening with crimson spots, and wondered: Am I a coward? No, I can’t be. He sensed the collision of his long-held anger with an unexpected and primal fear. This battle, he thought, Prokhorovka, it’s something I’ve never seen before. The Reds have carried the fight too far across the sunflower field, too close for strategy tanks swirling around each other, every distance lethal, in the dust and concussion, it’s impossible to tell ally from enemy.

Luis didn’t know what to do; the fear drove him backward. This took him home, to Spain. This was where he found his father. He appealed for a lesson from the man. Quick, Father, I have little time here.

Fear. What? Fear, Father.

Yes. An old and worthy theme. I’ve said many times that I’ve been afraid in the ring. I’ve told you, Luis, you remember. Some bulls, they come out snorting snot and clear-eyed and they will knock your knees for you, nothing you can do. The bravest don’t show it. But we all feel it. Nothing is harder to do than to match what makes you afraid. Nothing will make you more a man than the moment your knees stop knocking. The roses, hats, the wine sacks flung into the ring, these are for the man who stands his ground, and the toro who tries to take it from him. Be afraid, Luis. But stand. I’ve seen you do this. Do it again.

‘Balthasar.’

The intracom crackled. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘We’re close enough.’

Balthasar laughed. Good, Luis thought. The gunner believes this was courage to come so far into the heart of the valley before opening up.

‘AP loaded and waiting, sir.’

‘Driver, halt.’

The Tiger slowed with a great metal sigh. Luis needed both hands to raise and steady his binoculars. He’d have to let the chin drip awhile.

The Russians knew this was a Tiger. They kept their distance as best they could, trying first to surround and overwhelm the lesser Mark IVs. Luis peered hard through the haze, smoke growing more impenetrable with every fired round.

From here in the center of the field the Tiger’s range extended to every corner of the valley. There was no T-34 he couldn’t reach.

0920 hours

‘Go, go, Papa, go!’

Dimitri worked the gears. The General flattened out and ran like a thoroughbred over the ruts of the sunflower field.

Valentin had gotten them into a race with a Mark IV Dimitri didn’t know how far away the German ran beside them but he guessed it was ridiculously close; everything in this field was.

Valentin’s boots were not on Dimitri’s shoulders now.

‘Ease left!’ Valentin ordered. The Mark IV must have tried to shear off, quit the race, but Valya wasn’t relenting.

‘Straighten out.’

Valentin’s voice flipped between steely and excited. He’d already left one Mark IV burning in the first minutes of the battle. Valya had shot him from behind; Dimitri had never in his life been behind a German tank! Now this sprinting Mark IV was their second target. Valya was the commander and gunner. He handled both duties – each was enough for one man – with skill and a measure of cool, even in this deadly valley coiled with the SS. Their two forces had rushed into a tank fight no one in either army could have trained for, never imagined would happen. Two hundred tanks inside four square kilometers, it was like a saloon brawl, but not with fists, with cannons! Dimitri wanted to be proud of his son, that would ease his fright at their situation, but he had his hands full flogging the General back and forth at Valentin’s snap orders, stopping to fire, cranking into gear, and accelerating to keep moving, keep alive. And suddenly this race to the death. For that’s what this was: Whoever pulled ahead could hit the brakes first. The other, still moving, would slide by, straight into the sights of the winner. This was an impromptu strategy, made up on the spot. What else could they do? Who knew how to fight like this? Cossacks on horseback, yes, but these weren’t horses.

Dimitri eased the General in line and felt the speed climb again. The German wasn’t getting away so easily.

The yellow field began to scorch and collapse under the great armored fracas. More and more the sunflowers were trampled, or burned by exploding fuel. Dimitri could only see straight ahead, flashing in and out of thinning green and gold patches, through drifts of gray smoke. He dodged other tanks that lurched in his way, tanks locked in their own confrontations; he avoided wrecks. The German was somewhere beside them. Dimitri did everything he could to be faster, to get his son the shot he needed.

He sped over the valley, searching through the whipping flowers for an advantage, anything. The Mark IV was a fleet enough tank to make this race dicey. Fifty meters ahead to the left, a thick column of smoke caught his eye. A T-34 and a Mark IV had rammed each other. The Mark IV had ridden up the Soviet tank’s front. They’d both burst into fireballs. Through the smoke Dimitri spotted their crisscrossed turrets.

Valentin thought of the move the same moment Dimitri did.

‘Come left.’

The smoking pylon of the two fused tanks was only seconds ahead. Dimitri knew what his son intended: Valentin was going to shove the racing Mark IV, putting the two dead tanks right in his path. The German will have to swerve left – he won’t dodge right, closer to us – or stop. Either way, he’ll have to slow down. Valya will guess which way the German’s going to jump. We’ll stop first and have our cannon waiting.

‘Everyone hang on. Papa, full stop!’

Dimitri crammed on the brakes. The General skidded, Dimitri corrected to keep the treads sliding straight. He downshifted fast.

The General tilted forward as though to pour them all out through their hatches but Dimitri had the tank at a dead stop in seconds. Valentin did not fire immediately. The turret whined and rotated degrees right. In his head Dimitri trailed the Mark IV running away, saw it avoid the burning mess in front of it; he imagined the SS commander losing sight of the T-34 that had been broadside for almost a kilometer; the German thought, Oh, no; he screamed at his driver to swerve, evasive turns, now, now!; behind him, not far enough, carefully adjusting, the faster, smarter T-34 commander stayed in his range finder, neither fooled nor hot, following the German with the long eye of his cannon; the German counted seconds, gaining distance; does he shout, Ha ha! that he has got away? Dimitri turned in his seat to watch his son; Valentin toed the firing pedal with an oddly ginger tap for what it set loose; the breech recoiled with a massive shrug; Pasha fed it another round, all one flowing action; Valentin made a small adjustment to his aim and fired again; Pasha never left his knees, never seemed to be without a shell in his arms; Valentin fired again; three smoking casings lay on the matting; did the German commander count the shells coming in when he was done counting seconds?

‘Let’s get going, Papa.’

For thirty minutes, the General wandered over the valley floor, looking for jousts like a medieval knight. The sunflower field lay in total ruin, flattened under so many tracks, so much wrath and murder. Shapes strayed in the smoke. Valentin fired only a dozen more times, reporting no hits. Dimitri had no idea how the battle was going; who was winning? The tally of stilled Soviet tanks was greater than those of the Germans. This was no surprise to him; the Red force in these sunflowers had been held in reserve until Prokhorovka, they’d been untested in Kursk. These Germans were hardened SS. Dimitri felt hunted. He was always lost, reacting to shadows, boots stamped on his shoulders, he ran through stretches of sunflowers left standing that blinded him again, then emerged to no landmarks but more dead hulks. He saw tankers of both armies, out of their machines, scurrying to get away. Sasha took shots at them. He was never certain if the boy shot at SS or Russians, they all ran like any man would. He drove, in circles, straight, he stopped and started, he swerved. He stayed in a clench on the steering levers and waited, moving, never before so scared as he was now.

He drove past a beheaded T-34. The tank’s turret lay upside down ten meters from the chassis, pouring fumes. In seconds another ruined Red tank smoldered nearby. Valentin’s boot guided the General in a wide semicircle to the right, past four more destroyed T-34s, all of them arranged in a singed arc, a clock face of dead tanks.

‘Jesus,’ Valentin muttered.

‘What?’ Pasha demanded to know. He did not curb his impatience and Valya didn’t reprimand him. ‘What?’ the boy insisted.

‘Tiger,’ Valentin told them.

0933 hours

Luis chose the targets.

Balthasar ruined them.

The air hung brackish with haze. After an hour of combat in the sunflower field, fifty tanks burned. Each black spire of smoke fed the haze. Luis stood in his cupola to peer through the mists. High above, rain clouds threatened, dimming the day even more. The optics in the Tiger were excellent, but they could not pierce far enough into the swirling battle. The eyepieces did not draw out Luis’s instincts the way his raw eyes could. He remained half outside the tank, turning circles in the cupola, taking in the battle. He could not slake his hunger for the fight, keenly watching tanks of both sides dart through the shifting mists and thinning sunflowers. Packets of crackers stayed in his breast pocket, he let his body hunger like his heart. He followed one Red tank after another, even those thinly visible through the haze. When he knew what that tank would do, where it would turn, or when it would stop, he called Balthasar into the shot. Together, they rarely missed.

The wound in his chin slowed its drip, but not before Luis’s breast glistened with blood. He ignored this and stood tall in the cupola, aware of the image he cast, stolid and brave in the Tiger’s turret. Other Leibstandarte tanks roared past his place in the middle of the field. Luis was careful to show them a smoking barrel, himself in profile, raising a blood-smirched hand to single out another target. The motionless T-34s in a cemetery ring around his Tiger were testimony. This was the makings of legend: Luis, deathly thin and pale, blood-spattered, while his Tiger was the most powerful weapon on the battlefield. There would be talk of la Daga after today.

Luis had not moved the Tiger more than two hundred yards in any direction since firing his first shots. The Reds kept their distance, preferring to tangle with the less lethal Mark IVs, dancing in and out of the mists around Luis. Sometimes they darted at him, swooping in closer for a shot and paying for it. For minutes at a time, tanks of his company came to stand by him, idling on his flanks, hoping they were safer in the Tiger’s shadow. Luis let them rest to admire his and Balthasar’s shooting, then sent them back into the melee, like a father ordering his son outside to face a bully.

He watched one of his Mark IVs leave his side. At three hundred meters, just before disappearing into the mists, the tank was challenged by a T-34. Luis lifted his binoculars and followed the action between the two tanks. They entered into a race, vaulting across the field at top speeds, like two stallions, dashing, almost bumping each other. The Russian was cunning, he steered the Mark IV toward a wreck, making the German commander veer hard, slow down. The Red skidded to a remarkably quick stop, the tank seemed to hop to a standstill. The third shell from the Russian hit the SS tank in the rear; another shaft of smoke added its charcoal tarnish to the sky. Luis did not pull his binoculars from this Russian tank. He watched it circle, careful and nimble all at once. The Russian drove past several of the T-34s he and Balthasar had knocked out. There was an interesting quality to how this one tank moved through the battle and carnage. That race with the Mark IV was phenomenal, but now it seemed to skulk. What did this tank carry inside? It looked like heroism and reluctance married somehow. And something more, something rare. What? Luis considered, calculating.

The Red tank slowed, and Luis knew they had seen each other.

‘Balthasar. Sixty degrees right.’

The great turret pivoted around Luis. The gun barrel did not raise at all, every target in the sunflower field was so close there was no need for elevation. Every shot was a flat trajectory.

‘Do you see him?’

Balthasar did not answer for a moment. The smoke was thick, tanks ran every direction.

‘The one turning toward us?’ he said.

‘Correct.’

‘Ja.’

‘Range?’

‘Six hundred meters.’

‘Wait, Balthasar. This one… wait for him.’

Luis followed the coming Russian. He kept the binoculars up with one hand and patted his tunic pocket with the other. He grabbed a few crackers and slid them over his lips. The chewing made another drop of blood fall from his chin.

1003 hours

Dimitri had crossed boundaries all his life. He was a Cossack, he’d ridden over anyone’s land he cared to. He’d played tag with death many times. He’d sneered at any notion that this or that was a place he should not go. Love had corralled him once, inside one woman for their time together. Love bound him again to their children, Katya and Valya. And that was all for the lines drawn across his life. He’d loved his freedom, Kazak.

Now, at Valya’s command to attack the Tiger, Dimitri felt cold misgiving. He swept past the hulks of slaughtered T-34s. They were disfigured and burned, or simply perforated and still. The Tiger left marks on these T-34s that no other tank could, the destruction was utter. Dimitri skittered past them and it was like entering a bone-yard, the scat of killing at the mouth of some monster’s cave. The dead Soviet tanks were dark portents, warnings, do not come this way.

Dimitri reached for the handle on his hatch cover. To hell with this, he thought, there’s no help from armor so close to a Tiger. One hit, even a glancing shot from that big cannon, and we’ll be done. He pushed up the hatch and gazed into the open, seething air. The sunflowers were beaten down in this part of the field, from the Tiger’s pacing, from the Russian tanks’ bids to engage it, or from their doomed attempts to flee. Even half a kilometer away in the haze, the Tiger loomed a colossus.

Pasha objected to taking on the big tank but no one listened. Sasha stayed affixed to his machine-gun, quiet and uncertain.

Both boots slid off Dimitri’s shoulders. He was out of the traces. What was this?

Instead of a heel, a gentle touch of the son’s hand tapped beside Dimitri’s neck.

‘Take us in, Papa.’

Valentin was ceding the tank to Dimitri. That touch said, Ride, old man, old Cossack. Show us and show this German what you’ve learned, crossing all those times into and out of death. No one else but you can do this. Take us in.

In the last few days Dimitri had made himself want so little from Valentin. The boy had penned himself away from his father. Now the fences of that pen were down. Dimitri was free again, to go where he pleased.

He reined the General around at full speed. He crossed into the Tiger’s realm of crushed machines and flowers. This was where he wanted to go, because this was where his son needed to go.

The Tiger pivoted its turret to greet them.

1005 hours

Luis had never seen a T-34, or any tank, move like this.

The Russian dashed toward him at top speed; even at four hundred meters off Luis marveled at the rate this tank ran. It came in at a narrow angle, slicing to the left, eating up the smoky distance. Balthasar tracked the sprinting Red with the Tiger’s long barrel. The turret inched around Luis standing in his hatch. Luis aimed along with Balthasar, lining up the charging Red tank to the end of the barrel. Just when it seemed the gunner had the T-34 in his sights, the Russian skidded, turned full to the side like a slalom skier kicking up dirt instead of snow, then raced across the center line back to the right in an extraordinary zigzag. Balthasar’s hydraulic traverse clunked to a sudden stop. The turret shuddered, then whined – an aggravated sound – to catch up.

Luis dabbed ginger fingers to his chin. Salt from the crackers lingered on his fingertips, making the cut sting when he touched it. He winced and licked the fingertips absently to clean them, licking blood, too.

The Red tank skimmed right, then left again. The driver must be a damned madman, Luis thought, he’s scrambling the brains of his entire crew driving like that. For what? To display some panache before dying?

‘Balthasar.’

‘Sir.’

‘Range.’

‘Three hundred seventy-five meters.’

‘Leave it for a moment. Let them come. They’ll be too dizzy to do anything when they get here.’

Chuckles popped in the intracom.

‘Driver. Keep us facing him. I want frontal armor on him at all times.’

‘J a.’

The Tiger began to lurch in small, backing steps to stay face-to-face with the jitterbugging Russian. The Tiger’s adjustments were staccato, the driver charged one tread, then the other. Every move was jarring and ponderous. For a moment, Luis admired the Russian tank driver. This one had talent, style even, he handled his tank like the best picadors on horseback, it was lovely to see. But this Russian driver would die anyway. What could one T-34 do against a Tiger? Show off? Thumb its nose? Luis smiled at the thought of this Soviet horseman in flames in the next several seconds. The gash in his chin stretched, smarting him again, advising him to savor nothing. Prokhorovka would not fall to Luis so long as he was stuck in this field. Without Prokhorovka, he was mired in this body, this narrow ugly life. Every passing second the Americans dug in deeper in Sicily. Luis looked behind the lone charging Russian into the rest of the valley, where the Reds lost tank after tank and still seemed to have more than a hundred careening around, how many hundreds more across the whole corridor today? He swallowed and again tasted his own blood. He was angry in an instant.

‘Balthasar.’

‘Sir.’ The gunner’s response was quick, restive. Luis wondered, Is the crew getting nervous over this little pissant Russian?

‘Take a shot.’

The T-34 tank was making a long sideways run now to the left, fast and broadside. Balthasar rotated his turret. He drew a perfect bead. Luis braced himself for the blast; the jolt he felt was not the cannon but his driver yanking the Tiger again to keep the Russian to the front, disrupting Balthasar’s aim.

‘Driver, damn it! Stop!’

The driver shifted to neutral. The tank stilled. The Russian had closed now to within two hundred meters, tightening a loop around the Tiger. The T-34 sped just beyond Balthasar’s rate of turret traverse, which was only six degrees per second. With the Russian this close, at that clip, Balthasar could not keep up. Luis locked his eyes on the T-34 knifing through the remaining patches of standing sunflowers and could not believe what he saw. A murky cloud of dirt and the grist of stalks jetted from the Russian’s left-hand track. Luis thinned his eyes and leaned forward. Unbelievable. The tread was not moving. The Red driver had locked his brakes at full speed and somehow – Luis could not imagine it even as he watched it – spun the tank to a full stop. The Russian rocked and stopped two hundred meters away, with its gun facing the Tiger’s port side.

‘Balthasar!’

‘I can’t…’

Luis ducked at the last instant. The woof of the T-34’s cannon and the clang of the round striking the side of the Tiger leaped as one, the Russian was so close. Luis brought his hands over his soft helmet, protecting himself without knowing what to expect, no tank had ever fired at him from this distance. His eyes slammed shut, a fleeting death swept over him, but the Tiger shuddered and remained. Luis stood into the turret again. Smoke coursed from the port side. Balthasar never stopped revolving the big gun to the left, to catch the Russian. The cannon almost faced the rear now, but the T-34 was not at the business end of it, the tank had already gone, speeding off in its circle around the Tiger.

‘Driver! Move, now! Keep us facing him!’

The Tiger’s immense engine revved, the gears slapped into place. The tank seemed to stumble. Something tripped it from the left-hand track.

‘What!’ Luis shouted into his throat microphone.

‘I don’t know, sir. We might have taken a hit on a bogey wheel. I don’t know.’

The driver’s voice was frayed. This worry boded badly, as if it were the machine itself that was afraid.

The T-34 kept racing behind the Tiger. Balthasar traversed the turret as fast as it would go, straining but still lagging badly behind the swift Russian. Luis slid down to the deck. With feline speed Luis clambered over the fender and dropped to the ground beside the port wheels and tread. His cut chin throbbed; it was the least of his problems right now.

He was not surprised by what he saw, the deformed bogey wheel in the center. The Red shell – an armor-piercing round – had struck it near the top, bending the rim back into the two interlocking wheels behind it. The entire left side was sooted from the explosion, but the damage was contained. The Tiger would have to roll with care to avoid throwing the port track. The tank was hobbled, but not beyond repair.

His fury grew in the seconds he stared at the blackened, busted wheel. How was he to ride into Prokhorovka with this? How was he going to lead the assault out of this sunflower valley with a Tiger that couldn’t go faster than a walk? Damn it, he thought, damn it! He’d have to deal with this rampaging Russian – there he was, scooting around to the other side with Balthasar chasing him -then limp back up the slope for a field repair. Carajo!

He leaped free of gravity, shooting off the shivering earth up the side of the Tiger and over the rotating turret. He slid his legs into his hatch and snapped into the intracom. He’d been on the ground for ten seconds, and when he returned to his place he found the T-34 still outracing the end of Balthasar’s cannon. Luis knew: the Russian was going to take a shot at the starboard wheels, to cripple the Tiger entirely. Then he’d circle in for the final blow.

‘Driver, it’s a port bogey wheel. Reverse starboard track only. Bring us around. Balthasar.’

‘Ja.’

‘He’s going to pull the same trick on the other side. I want you to fire at him. Keep him moving. Don’t let him stop.’

The Tiger lurched backward, pivoting on the inert left track to turn the Tiger to the right. The driver swung Balthasar’s cannon around faster than the traverse could. The tank came to an abrupt halt, swaying Luis in his cupola. He bit back a curse at his driver. There was the T-34. A brown rooster tail spit from his spinning tracks. The Russian ran behind the Tiger’s long barrel.

‘Range.’

‘Three hundred meters.’

‘I don’t care if you hit him. Let him know you will if he stops again.’

The day was still early. If he shouted enough at the field mechanics, the Tiger could be ready for a charge on Prokhorovka by dusk. He didn’t need this lunatic T-34 on his scorecard, not at the risk of returning to his place at the head of the battle by nightfall. Let him go, Luis thought, I’ll settle his hash in Prokhorovka if that pendejo is still alive tonight.

In the next moment, without warning, Balthasar fired. The report shoved Luis about in the cupola, cudgeling his back into the hard rim. This jarred his temper at the speeding T-34. He said a silent prayer that God would give him the opportunity to kill every man inside that tank.

The round missed, a pillar of steppe dirt rose beyond the Russian. Balthasar gave the T-34 too much range and the shell sailed over his head. But the Russian had to know now he’d pulled the Tiger’s whiskers. The loader shoved in another shell. The gunner glued himself to his optics, rotating the turret, talking to the driver to give him another goose around to the left. The starboard tread surged forward and quit. Balthasar’s gun came around. The Tiger moved like an old man with a peg leg. Luis lowered himself in the hatch for the blast. Balthasar fired. Luis popped up and peered through the gases and flung soil at the T-34. This shell missed, too, but in front of the Russian. Balthasar was bracketing him.

The T-34 slowed.

‘Balthasar, fast! He’s coming around for a shot!’

The turret whined, the hydraulic traverse brought the barrel dead on to the Russian tank. Balthasar slipped the tip of the gun just ahead of the T-34. Now, Luis thought, go ahead, travahata. Do your dance one more time, under my gun.

The Russian skidded, still the slaloming skier. Balthasar’s long lethal eye watched the Red driver’s antics, more fabulous moves and jukes. But this time the Red did not spin toward Luis to stop and take a shot at the starboard wheels. He stepped on the gas and headed away from the circle, into the battle mists of the sunflower field. Balthasar had chased him off. Luis was relieved only for a second. No, he thought. This Russian is going away to bring back others, a hunting pack to help him finish off the wounded Tiger before it can drag itself out of the valley.

‘Let him go, Captain?’

Luis raised his binoculars. The Russian was hurrying off into the haze, making his little crazed dodges left and right.

‘No, gunner. Give him a parting gift. And Balthasar – ‘

‘Ja.’

‘Hit him this time.’

Luis stared down the long cannon. Balthasar twitched it left, then left a degree more. The T-34 sideslipped, skipping and raising his plume. Balthasar waited. The tip of the barrel elevated a hair. Luis ducked.

The cannon wailed.

The Tiger rocked on its heels, then settled. Luis stood into the miasma of dust and fume. On all sides, the battle in the sunflower field raged on, thunder and flame erupted from every corner of the valley floor. A thin rain began to speckle the deck of the Tiger.

Luis did not need the binoculars to see the Russian smoking and still.

1009 hours

Dimitri groaned. Every joint griped, his neck, hips, and shoulders felt pulled apart and snapped.

His goggles were gone. Smoke raked his eyes, gray billows of oil fumes and steam boiled out his open hatch. He groped through the coils to Sasha. The boy was there, slack and collapsed. Dimitri shook him by the wrist and saw the red face gleam with blood.

‘No,’ Dimitri muttered.

At that the boy hacked and twisted in his seat, he awoke like a fighting fish. Dimitri took a harder grasp on the boy’s arm to tell him he was alive. Dimitri caught a glimpse of the boy’s blood splashed on the tank wall where he’d slammed his face when the German shell hit.

Dimitri heard coughing. The intracom was off, the General was out cold. The tail of the tank hissed, hot metal sprayed water and diesel.

‘Get out,’ his son spewed in a huffing voice. ‘Everyone out!’

The first thing Dimitri saw in the turret was Pasha’s toothless open mouth. The thick boy lay crumpled on the matting, eyes closed and limbs splayed in an awful way to show he was either unconscious or dead. Several teeth lay around his cheek. Dimitri couldn’t reach him to check for breathing. Beside Pasha, Valya’s boots wobbled but planted him firmly enough to stand and open his hatch to release the smoke.

The Tiger had hit them square in the rear. The engine compartment and radiator were surely torn up and lost, but they’d contained the blast enough to let the crew, or most of them, survive.

‘Valya,’ Dimitri called. ‘Valya.’

His son bent to bring his face down to Dimitri. Smoke poured out above him as though up a chimney.

‘Papa.’ Valentin grinned. ‘Good.’ His face was welted and bruised. The bridge of his nose colored, likely broken. He nodded at his father.

Dimitri returned the nod, to tell Valya he was heartstruck the boy was alive.

‘Sasha?’ Valentin asked.

‘He’s okay. Cut up a little.’

‘Get out, Papa. Get Sasha out.’

Dimitri raised his eyes to the motionless loader. ‘Pasha?’ he asked.

Valentin shook his head, he didn’t know yet. He laid a hand on Pasha’s ribs, then nodded. The big loader was breathing. Pasha will have a mouth of gold teeth to show for this day in the sunflowers, Dimitri thought.

‘Go, Papa. I’ll get Pasha out.’

‘We stung him, boy, didn’t we?’

‘Yes, we damn well did.’

‘Someone will finish him off before the day’s out.’

‘Yes. Someone will. Get going.’

Dimitri started to turn around. He reached a hand out to shake Sasha into action. Valentin stopped him with a hard grip to the shoulder.

‘Papa. You were…’

The look on Valya’s face was the awakened gaze of a son at a marvelous father, an indomitable figure.

‘I know, boy. Come on. We’re not done. Hurry, Valya. See you outside.’

Dimitri got woozy Sasha to open the belly escape hatch between his feet; then helped him slide out of the tank. When Sasha was on the ground, Dimitri tossed a glance over his shoulder to see Valya wrestling with Pasha, who roused like a sleepy child. We’re all alive, Dimitri thought, our luck is changing. He rose from his seat through the driver’s hatch and stood out into the sunflower field.

Sitting inside the General, careening back and forth over the valley floor, he’d had no way of experiencing any part of the battle except his own. Dimitri slid to the ground and felt it tremble.

The noise hit him next. Tank engines howled on every side, an incredible number of them in this valley, more than should fit here, engines crossed paths, pistons decided life and death as much as cannon fire. Tracks squealed over sprockets, more than a hundred guns mauled each other at gladiator distances, and from lifeless tanks strewn all over the field the black pulses of oil flames panted into the morning like the devil’s breath. Overhead, unseen behind clouds and haze, more engines struggled to kill one another high in the air. Dimitri felt helpless and out of place, a man on this battlefield racked with motors and clashing steel. He leaped when a hand grabbed at his boot.

‘Sasha! Christ, boy, come on, get up.’ Dimitri helped the crawling lad from under the General’s treads, glad to be startled out of his astonishment. Several dead T-34s and one Mark IV were within a hundred meters. Closer was a deep crater. There was no time to salvage the toolbox he kept kit-strapped to the General’s deck. Ah, well, he thought. Better to save boys than wrenches. With Sasha leaning on him, running, Dimitri noticed for the first time a drizzle had begun to fall on the valley.

At the lip of the hole, Dimitri lowered Sasha, then jumped in after him. He clambered up on his elbows to look back at the General.

Pasha stumbled over the field behind them, clamping a hand to his bleeding mouth and staggering. Dimitri waved to be sure the loader saw them in the crater. Pasha waved back a crimson palm.

Where was Valya?

Dimitri helped the hurt loader into the crater and lowered him next to Sasha. He did not let go of the boy’s arm.

‘Where’s Valentin? Pasha, listen to me. Where is the lieutenant?’

Pasha shook his head, not wanting to talk through the bloody gaps in his gums. Dimitri shook his arm.

‘He’sh in ‘e tank,’ Pasha burbled. ‘He won’ come.’

‘What… what do you mean he won’t come?’

Pasha pleaded with a puckered face to be left alone, to see if he could live out the rest of the day in this crater. If Lieutenant Berko wanted to stay in the tank, that was fine, because Pasha wanted to stay here and keep his head down. Dimitri stuck a finger at Sasha to instruct him, Pasha was just too stupid.

‘Don’t move. You’re safest here. Wait ‘til a T-34 comes by and flag them down and get on. Then get out of here.’

Sasha sat up. ‘Where…?’ Dimitri pushed him back down to the warm dirt of the crater. Sasha sank back, unresisting.

‘I’ve got to go, boys.’

Dimitri gripped both lads on their knees and squeezed, to be sure they could feel his parting blessing through their pains. ‘Kazak, Pasha. Kazak, Sashinka.’

He scrabbled over the lip of the crater. Every joint ached but he cast his pain off him like cobwebs; this is no time to be an old man, he thought. The two boys he left behind had a chance in the crater if they stayed low, if they had any more luck at all today; they’d used plenty already this morning. But Valentin. What was he doing?

Dimitri ran. His hip stabbed at every step but he would not let it slow him. He crashed over the few standing sunflowers rather than run around them. He was halfway to the General when he stopped.

Forty meters away, the commander’s hatch cover to the General fell and clinched down. Dimitri’s chest seized. Moments later, he watched the driver’s door shut, too. He could hear the hard metal clangs, like a closing cell.

Valya had seen him coming. He was not going to leave the tank.

Dimitri screamed across the distance, into the bellow of cannons and screeching shells. He bent double at the waist and balled his fists.

The General stood stoic, weeping smoke. The two stood, man and tank, father and son, both exhausted and glaring and absolute.

Then Valentin answered Dimitri. The turret of the dead tank, facing the opposite direction, began to rotate, creaking, turned by the hand crank.

The General’s engine and all power were down. But the gun still worked. And Valentin was still the gunner.

‘No,’ Dimitri protested, knowing the word was useless.

The Tiger.

Dimitri cursed and tore his eyes to the left, across the earsplitting valley. Four hundred meters off, the monstrous German tank was withdrawing, backing away with its frontal armor toward the field. Valentin was going to take another shot.

‘At what?’ Dimitri raged at his son. ‘At what? The fucking thing is leaving, let it go! You can’t hurt it, let it go!’

Valentin had no angle if the German retired straight up the slope. Any shell smacking that thick hide would only snag the Tiger’s attention and get an answering .88 mm round, aimed at a motionless, defenseless T-34.

Valya said the two of them had traded places. That Dimitri was not ready for it. Dimitri thought now, we have not traded this place, father and son. You will not die first, boy.

‘No,’ he said again.

This time the word did not feel so without purpose on his lips.

Dimitri whirled from the General. Four other T-34s knocked out by the Tiger were within running distance. If he could find one of them that still had a working cannon, he would…

Before he could take a step, a Mark IV bore down on him out of a patch of sunflowers. He caught the sparking of the machine-gun in the corner of the glacis plate. Bullets ripped up the steppe near his boots, others zinged past like hellion bees. He dove to the dirt. He barely heard the zip of the machine-gun in the loudness of the battle and the crunching of the tracks. The machine-gun looked for him, tossing stalks and dirt into the air, then paused. Dimitri lifted his head out of his hands. The Mark IV still barreled straight for him.

‘Damn it,’ Dimitri sputtered and jumped off the ground, gritting his teeth against the pain in his leg. He had to lead the Mark IV away from the General. He couldn’t let the German spot Valya turning the T-34’s turret. And he couldn’t run back to the crater where Pasha and Sasha lay shaken and bleeding. He sprinted across the field, scrambling over trampled flowers and the dimpled ruts of tank tracks. He headed toward the nearest of the dead T-34s killed by the Tiger. The Red tank was sixty meters off, he needed all his speed. He pumped his arms and the Mark IV turned with him.

Bullets hacked at the ground behind him. He wove his way to the T-34, each shift of direction shot bolts of agony out of his hip. This Red tank was not burned like the others that had died near it. A wide hole had been bored neatly through the middle of the turret. At this range, the Tiger’s big cannon had drilled a shell right through one side of the T-34 and out the other! He had only that instant to marvel, the Mark IV’s machine-gunner cut loose again. Dimitri threw himself between the T-34’s treads just ahead of a sickle of bullets slashing at the soles of his airborne boots. He hit and skidded under the tank, his hip hurt so much, he thought he might have taken a bullet in it. Thirty meters away the Mark IV curled a small semicircle, pondering whether to keep up the chase against this lone tanker, then lost interest and veered away to another of the hundred duels raging in the valley. Dimitri peered out into the rain and watched the tank rumble past the General. The German did not see Valya’s slowly rotating gun.

Dimitri rolled onto his back. His hip smarted enough to force a tear down his cheek. He heaved for breath.

Just above his nose, the hard belly of the T-34 rattled. Dimitri smelled exhaust.

The tank was running.

Dimitri swept aside his pain again and thrust himself out from between the treads. The hatch was open. The driver was gone, so was the machine-gunner. He spun to look one more time at the General. Valya had the turret cranked halfway around to the escaping Tiger. In another fifteen seconds he’d have the gun in position. Dimitri hoisted himself up on the T-34’s fender. He stepped down into the driver’s hatch. He bent his knees and descended.

Dimitri almost leaped back out. Blood was everywhere. His feet reached for the pedals, skimming through a horrible slick in the bottom of the tank. The driver’s gauges and controls were splashed red. Dimitri whirled behind him and recoiled at the bodies of the commander and leader. The German .88 shell had cut through them both; the commander had been standing when the round entered, he was split and folded over at the ribs, his two halves were toppled on their sides, spilling entrails and every fluid the body courses, his shocked face toppled between his own boots. The loader was slumped in his seat, headless. The German shell had cut through his neck, then exited the turret beside him. The neat hole leaving the armor was rimmed with gore where the pressure sucked out, taking the loader’s head with it. Shrapnel had whittled both bodies with a thousand crimson pits, their coveralls were shredded. The smell of death cooped in this tank was overpowering: gut, bile, and blood mingled to make the compartment ferocious and sickening. Dimitri gripped the steering levers. The driver and machine-gunner must have leaped out as soon as they discovered they were still alive, no reason to stay in this hellhole.

He shifted into first gear, nailed the accelerator, and took off. The corpses behind him jostled with a damp flop. Dimitri shivered and hit second gear.

‘Christ,’ he muttered. He had only seconds, so that was all he could say for himself and his dead crew. He sucked his cheeks and found enough moisture in his mouth to spit into the blood at his feet, to clean his tongue of the vomit taste. Go, he thought. Go.

He was not able to see the General any longer. He drove hard, shifting again. He said to Valya, ‘Wait, boy. Wait for me.’

He slung the T-34 around as fast as he could, the bodies behind him skidded in their butchery but he could pay them no more mind. There was the limping Tiger, retreating into its own exhaust out of the sunflower valley. He sped toward it, skimming the T-34 back and forth as he had done the General, but this time not to get a shot, only to draw the Tiger’s attention. To make it stop. Make it turn sideways. To make the great son of a bitch aim its cannon at his speeding ghost tank, and not his son.

1012 hours

Luis backed away.

His Tiger could manage no more pace than a brisk walk. An hour ago, he’d rumbled down the slope through the wall of purple smoke, he was the first tank into the valley, blasting Russians and crushing flowers. He’d been a titan, astride a titan’s tank. Now he shrank away, stanching his own blood, his Tiger limping on a bad paw, spooling out the land he’d reeled in. Backing away, he was no larger than his little famished body.

Luis contained his anger at the receding battle. He would be back before dusk, mechanics be damned! And then he’d swell with the land again. He surveyed the departing field, the number of hulks he’d left around him. A dozen, more, he imagined their smoke rising into the sky to write his name in dark script. The sunflower field knew he’d been there, and Prokhorovka would know him when he returned tonight.

No other tanks came near. The Russians left him alone. Why would they come after a retreating Tiger; if it’s leaving the battlefield, isn’t that good enough for today? Why risk taking it on, still dangerous? Balthasar fired no more shots. Luis would not let the driver stop long enough for the gunner to take aim.

He surveyed the valley now that he was leaving it. Leibstandarte was stymied down here, but holding its own against vastly superior numbers. The Russians couldn’t keep pouring tanks into the fight, their reserves had to have a limit. His division would surely punch through by afternoon. He couldn’t tell what was taking place outside the sunflower field, north of the Psel with Totenkopf and south of the rail mound for Das Reich. The rain added its beaded curtain to the haze, closing down visibility. The valley magnified the wrench of steel and the deep whumps of cannons and exploding armor, giving Luis’s ears no information from the surrounding frays. He believed they must be as intense as his own, and grimaced that he did not know if the day was being won or lost. But backing away from the battle now, he was amazed at its magnitude. Still almost two hundred tanks clashed at close quarters in the sunflowers. Never before, he thought, and he had to cinch down his rancor at leaving the history that was carving itself out in this field. If Hitler could see this, he would not talk of stopping the assault on Kursk for Italy’s sake. He would applaud and come fight alongside us, and be part of this.

Luis had no more to eat. All his crackers and tidbits were gone. His stomach agitated for attention, he had nothing to give it but water. He dipped his head below the hatch to reach for his canteen, then stood in the cupola, unscrewing the canteen cap. He took a swig, eyes open, then lowered the jug too fast in surprise at what he saw. Water drizzled down his chin, cooling his cut; a pink wash slipped down his neck, under his black SS collar.

What was this? He winced into the gunsmoke mist and falling rain, at a Russian tank charging at him, cutting up the ground in that unbelievable lightning zigzag.

The crazy Red driver. It’s him again! But Luis killed his tank minutes ago!

He dropped the open canteen, it banged down into the Tiger’s well. He raised his binoculars to pierce the haze in the valley.

The T-34 came hard, sideslipping. What was the fool doing? Was this some sort of loco Russian cat with nine damned lives?

‘Balthasar!’

‘I see him, Captain.’

‘Range.’

‘Three hundred meters. Closing.’

‘Stay on him.’

‘Jawohl’

The Tiger’s turret jerked awake. The hydraulic traverse began its high-pitched labor to bring the big cannon to bear. Balthasar’s voice had betrayed no concern. The gunner was locked in, figuring distance and lead, tracking the target with nothing else to think of. The turret jittered around Luis’s chest, left, then right, trying to keep up with the Russian driver all over again. This was the same man, yes? Supposedly a dead man, coming at the Tiger again in another tank. There couldn’t be two Red drivers with that ability. The T-34 dodged and weaved, alone in the attack, just like before. Luis recognized every move. He held out no welcome for the return of a worthy foe. He sensed a cold touch of dread. Something was going on that he could not fathom.

The Russian sheered off from his swerving headlong dash. Luis had guessed he would. The T-34 bounded to the left, to advance down the damaged side of the Tiger. Damn it, Luis thought. He’s going for the port bogey wheels again! One more hit there and the Tiger will lose a track, we’ll only go in circles. Of course!

‘Driver! Turn to him. Keep him away from the side. I want frontal armor on him! Move!’

The Tiger jerked to a stop. Gears and driveshaft howled. The Tiger came out of reverse and lurched forward now, spinning only the right tread to push the tank around to the left. Balthasar worked the traverse to catch up with the enemy boring in alongside. Again the swift T-34 managed to stay just ahead of the rotating cannon. But this time the whole crew knew what this Russian had in store. The Tiger’s driver did a better job of swinging the chassis around to keep their front trained on the Russian. Balthasar’s gun slid ahead of the T-34.

‘Got him,’ intoned the gunner.

‘No. Stay on him. He’ll stop in a moment. Then.’

‘Ja’

The Red tank kept up its dash along the left side, two hundred meters off and angling in, narrowing the distance. Balthasar’s gun moved with the Russian. Luis stared hard at the T-34. Something was wrong. He raised his binoculars and focused on the neat hole in the center of the Russian’s turret. Luis recalled the shot, one of Balthasar’s first in the sunflower field. The .88 shell had sliced right through the Russian tank like cheese and left it standing in the field, spookily intact but surely dead. This loco Soviet driver and his gunner had somehow survived the hit on their own tank. They’d crept into this one, mice to the cheese, and brought the tank alive for another go at the big cat, Luis’s retreating Tiger.

Why, Luis thought? It’s insane to come back. I killed you once, I’ll do it again! In his mind he hurled this at the Russian tank but felt his warning glance off the slanted green armor. No, they won’t heed. The Russians are maniacs, reckless, just like Hitler says, unflinching, witless, subhumans. Do you have to kill them all more than once, is that how this war is going to go? Luis was hungry and had no food. He needed to get his damaged tank repaired, he needed to leave and return to the battle with haste, everything with haste; history and glory look slow in books but these things are only made in flashes of opportunity, by the hand on the trigger. He was incensed that this single T-34 wouldn’t let him back away. Luis had already killed this man and this tank! The Russian driver and his gunner were using up more than their allotments of one life each. In Spanish under his breath he cursed them, glaring down the rotating barrel of the Tiger’s gun. He would have to stop backing away and fight, though he did not want to, he did not have time for this. The thought of killing something or someone twice did not sit with him, not with what he knew and expected of God and death. This was wrong. This whispered to him with the voice of the T-34’s winding diesel – close enough now to breathe in his ear – of mala suerte, bad, bad luck.

Just as he predicted, the T-34 stopped, like an arrow finding its mark, sudden but this time unremarkable. The Russian slid to a halt straight at the end of Balthasar’s barrel. Its own cannon was off, not fixed on the Tiger.

‘Now?’ Balthasar asked.

Why stop there, Luis wondered? Why not outrun our turret again? There’s nothing the Russian can do, not even this close, a hundred meters away. His round will smack the frontal plating of the Tiger and make no more than a deep dent. One word to Balthasar and I’ll blow him backward another hundred meters.

Why isn’t his turret moving? He hasn’t aimed at us yet. What is he…?

The T-34 idled.

The Tiger was broadside to the sunflower field, facing the decoy. Luis looked across the short distance into the open driver’s hatch. He saw a white face and a bloody palm waving hello. Or goodbye.

‘Now?’ Balthasar pressed.

Luis turned only his head, knowing he could not turn his tank fast enough.

1014 hours

Valentin’s shell hit the Tiger on the starboard bogeys. Dimitri watched the big tank vanish in a maelstrom of smoke and flash. He balled his open hand into a fist and shook it at the instant fireball. He shouted into the din, ‘Good shot, son! Now hit him again!’ The explosion was done in a moment. The Tiger weathered the hit with incredible brawn, it barely shuddered. It was a stupendous sight to see how much damage it could take. When the smoke receded, the German commander was not standing in his cupola. He’d either been blown out or ducked at the last instant.

Valentin was alone in the General. The son would have to scoot around the hot extended breech, dig up another AP round from the bins, ram the shell into the breech, and get back to his optics. Any adjustment to his targeting would have to be made with the hand cranks. Valya had a broken nose, and who knew what other injuries, to deal with. Valentin would do what he had to do, no question. Dimitri grinned up into the dark bore of the Tiger’s cannon, proud and certain that this best trait of his own, if none of the others, would stay alive in his son.

His hands and feet were ready to shift into gear. The Tiger smoked, brooding. The big tank was bruised, but how badly? Could Valentin fire again and kill it before the Tiger recovered?

The Tiger’s enormous engine roared. Its transmission engaged, black exhaust expelled, the tracks of both sides shrieked over damaged wheels.

The tank bucked backward ten meters.

The Tiger could still move!

Dimitri cursed. Now Valya would have to take aim again. Without the General’s hydraulics, this would take precious seconds, perhaps more than Valentin had. Damn it!

The Tiger backed and pivoted to the right, racking itself to turn toward the center of the field, a great wounded creature and now certainly angry. Its cannon traversed away from Dimitri, careless for his curses or his life. He was no threat, a T-34 with no gunner, with holes in his turret.

In the Tiger’s cupola, the commander reappeared. He waved back at Dimitri, blood on his hand, too. Then he pivoted, with binoculars pressed to his brow, his turret rotating around him. He ignored Dimitri.

The German turned to his right, to Valentin.

Dimitri spit again into the red bog beneath his boots. Enough, he thought. He shifted the T-34 into gear and mashed the accelerator. Let’s shake these bloody hands.

The German commander’s face left his binoculars, not ignoring Dimitri now.

1014 hours

Luis believed only for the first second that the loco Russian was leaving. The T-34’s treads spun, again with that unlikely acceleration, and the tank with the dead turret turned in to the rain.

Then the Russian swerved back at the Tiger. He angled to the right, racing to stay ahead of the Tiger’s turning cannon.

Balthasar’s voice bit through the engine clamor.

‘What’s he doing?’

The gunner had finally gone urgent. Luis fought to keep panic out of his own throat. He needed to give an order, but confusion and dismay delayed him. He was divided in half: one Red tank drew a bead on him from four hundred meters off; another bore in crazily from a hundred meters away. Something wasn’t fair here, the mala suerte. He felt like he’d stepped in a hornet’s nest, why were they coming after him like this? These two madmen working in tandem, why?

Luis found his voice. Only a moment had passed, but all that remained was moments.

‘Gunner, stay on target.’

The Tiger’s turret continued to rotate clockwise around Luis. The T-34 out there with the live cannon had to be handled first.

‘Driver, keep backing, keep turning!’

‘Ja’

The damage to the starboard bogeys was bad but no worse than the port wheels. The Tiger could still stumble along slowly, could still get out of this valley. But there was nothing Luis could do to avoid this crazy T-34 closing in. He could have Balthasar try to shoot him down, but that would delay dealing with the other, more dangerous Red tank. The Russian driver continued to skid around to the right, stubbornly staying in front of the pivoting Tiger. With every meter, the Russian tightened his course.

Luis could not use binoculars to check on the shooting T-34 out there in the mist, he had to cut his eyes back and forth between the two attackers. Across the sunflower field, the shooter’s power was down; he was aiming at the retreating Tiger manually. Balthasar, with all his hydraulics running, ought to be able to fix on the Russian gunner first, if Luis could keep everyone calm.

What to do with this charging cabron? Kill him, too.

‘Bow gunner!’

‘Ja!’

‘Aim at the driver’s hatch!’

The machine-gun in the Tiger’s glacis plate added its bursts to the rising din of those desperate seconds. Bullets scorched out of the ball-mounted barrel, tattooing against the wheeling T-34. The rounds ricocheted, striking sparks from the armor. The Russian tank was too much broadside for the bow gunner to have a shot into the open driver’s hatch. The Russian bobbed and weaved and drew closer, still running ahead of Balthasar’s traversing turret. Luis shook his head at what he saw: this damned driver was only seventy-five meters away now and gaining speed, insanity! What is he doing? I’m simply going to kill the shooter’s tank – again! – then I’m going to kill him! What is he doing? Why? Something, something is wrong.

He tore his gaze from the charging tank to glance down the length of the Tiger’s cannon. Across the valley the shooter would be in Balthasar’s sights in moments. Just fifteen more degrees clockwise. Come on, Luis urged. His thin chest tightened. Come on! He couldn’t determine through the haze if the Red gunner had them in his own sights yet. But he had no time left to focus on the shooter. Here came the other one.

The speeding Russian tank leveled out, no more dodges marred his approach. He charged straight in, on a diagonal at the Tiger’s starboard fender. The angle from the right was too sharp, he was beyond the bow gunner’s reach. Luis heard the crazy driver pop his clutch and shift gears, hitting full stride.

‘Driver!’ Luis hollered, but he had no orders. Someone, several voices, screamed, ‘Look out! He’s… !’

He’s what? Luis clenched his hands on the cupola rim, bracing for the impact. His mind raced, fast as the charging T-34. He’s what? Going to ram us? And seconds after the minor shock of it we’re still going to blow up his damned mate across the field; then we’re going to pull back from the collision, depress Balthasar’s cannon and kill him. What the hell is he…?

In the last mote of time, before the final meter between the T-34 and the Tiger slammed shut, Luis understood.

He’s not crazy. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

The Russian hit hard. He rammed the middle of his glacis plate into the Tiger’s right-hand fender. Luis was jolted but his massive tank held its ground, it weighed more than twice the T-34.

Luis roared, ‘Back! Keep backing!’

The Tiger tried to pull away from the Russian, the huge Maybach engine strained to revolve the tracks over injured wheels. The screech of metal against metal was excruciating. The T-34 had hit with so much speed and momentum it lodged itself against the Tiger’s starboard drive sprocket. The right side of the Tiger was tangled and numbed.

‘Driver, port tracks! Full reverse!’

The left-hand treads spun. The Tiger began to peel away from the T-34.

The Russian would not allow this. He hit his gas and the gap closed instantly. The T-34 kept its weight butted against the starboard drive sprocket. With just one working track, the Tiger could only drag itself in a circle.

‘He’s not letting go!’ The driver cried out the obvious.

Balthasar shouted, ‘Captain!’

Luis did not need to hear Balthasar’s next words. He saw for himself the extent of what the loco Russian had done, the method in his madness.

The T-34’s cannon had cut in front of the Tiger’s long gun, the two long barrels were crossed like fencing swords. Luis’s turret was stopped dead, the hydraulic traverse whined in frustration. As long as the tanks stayed jammed together, Balthasar could not rotate clockwise any farther, not the last few crucial degrees toward the shooter across the field.

Luis leaned forward in his cupola to peer down on the smashing T-34. The smaller tank had both tracks stroking wildly, kicking up mud and bits of ruined flowers, as though racing over the valley instead of plunging only torturous centimeters. The two tanks spit billows of exhaust, their squalling engines pushed and pulled but without decision, they were fused as much by force as willpower. Luis leaned out to his right, to look down into the Russian’s open hatch. He caught a glimpse of matted gray hair. The face tilted up at him. It was sharp-nosed, grimy and determined. Luis wanted to ask, Is this how you wanted to end up, old man? Here, with me? He yearned to climb down and poke his head into the hatch, to tell the driver – not such a lunatic, now, it seemed – to go away, that Luis didn’t want to end up here, either.

The driver bared his teeth up at Luis, either a smile or grim intent. The Tiger kept trying to disengage, bucking and humping backward, both tanks howled. The old man would not let loose. His partner the shooter was still out there, aiming at a Tiger that was being wrestled to a standstill. But the shooter’s tank was immobile, and the Tiger still had its thick frontal armor facing him.

Maybe he won’t shoot, Luis thought. The one out there. Maybe he’s waiting for reinforcements to come teeming after us. Or maybe he won’t shoot and risk killing this old man. This what… beloved commander, friend, uncle? Or father?

‘Yes,’ Luis said, and the word was buried, even he could not hear it through the clamor of the entangled machines.

Maybe the shooter would wait. But Luis could not.

He tore his cloth helmet from the intracom, leaving the cable looped over the back of his chair. He hoisted his legs out of the cupola and climbed onto the broad turret deck. He drew his Luger sidearm into a blood-crusted hand. The Tiger rollicked from the ramming Russian. Luis knelt to steady himself. He inched forward like a sailor in a tempest. He raised the Luger and snapped off a shot at the T-34’s open driver’s hatch. The Russian’s head ducked, the round glanced off the armor.

Luis crept closer to the rim of the deck for a better look at the Russian. There was the old man’s chest, his gray coveralls.

Luis raised the Luger.

‘Bastante!’ he yelled down at the Russian. ‘Bastante, cabron!’

The gun wavered with the swaying deck. His bloodied finger tightened on the trigger.

The Tiger’s turret moved beneath him.

What? Luis muttered, ‘Que pasa?’

He pulled his eye off the pistol to look down under his boots.

The turret was turning! The long .88 barrel pivoted counterclockwise, freed from the Russian’s blocking cannon.

Damn it! Balthasar couldn’t wait! Stupid! Without orders the gunner was traversing the turret the opposite direction, rotating all the way around to the left for a shot at the Red shooter.

Balthasar, the thousand-year Aryan, was turning the Tiger’s vulnerable side armor to the sunflower field!

Luis dropped the pistol. He dove backward for the commander’s hatch. The turret whined to the left, every second revealing more of its thinner side plating to the Soviet shooter. He rammed his head down into the hatch, past Thoma’s blood, and screamed, ‘No! Stop! Stop!’

Balthasar had his back turned, his attention was riveted into his optics. Beside the gunner, on the far side of the immense breech, the loader looked up from his seat. Luis screamed at him, gesturing frantically at Balthasar, ‘Stop the turret! Stop him!’ The loader looked stunned, no idea what was going on. ‘Stop him!’ Luis screamed.

Beneath Luis the turret kept turning, the huge turret with the undefeatable cannon.

Luis fumbled for the cord to reconnect himself to the intracom. His fingers waggled at it, just out of reach. He’d have to clamber down to his seat to retrieve it, plug in, and scream into the microphone. That would be too late.

The loader got the idea. He set down the shell he cradled. He rose from his seat and leaned far across the breech to tap Balthasar on the back, saying something into the intracom. Balthasar was rapt and did not turn away from his eyepiece. There was a comic aspect to the loader’s calm, he was oblivious to their peril. Luis watched the slow drift of events, more seconds gone. The loader was a dead man. So was Balthasar. Luis did not bother to inform them.

By now the turret had spun a quarter way around to the left, exposing its entire side to the field. The waiting, aiming Russian gunner out there in his smoking tank with his live cannon must be amazed at his good fortune. Now he will shoot. He must.

Luis lifted his head out of his hatch, done with frenzy. He lay on his belly, facing the rear of the turret. The Russian driver had not let up for a moment, gnawing and jamming the starboard drive sprocket, holding the Tiger in place. The two tanks seemed to be mating, violent, the cramming of animals. Luis slid forward on his stomach to see better into the Russian hatch. The old man was there, leaning in to his gears and levers; he looked to be gripping the reins of his animal, galloping flat out, going nowhere.

The Russian looked up. His mouth was wide open. He was bellowing.

Luis used the last second to decide, after all, the old man was insane.

1015 hours

Dimitri watched the Tiger’s cannon rotate away from his blocking barrel. The Tiger, the tank killer, was laying itself wide open.

With the turret revolving from him, Dimitri could back off. He could fly into reverse, spin around, hit the gas, and get out of there.

But if he freed the Tiger, the big tank would back away, too. Valentin’s aim would be thrown off. With just a flywheel, the boy might not be able to adjust his gun fast enough.

The Tiger’s turret turned, like a backward second hand, set to go off when it reached Valentin.

Dimitri had to stay, grappling the German to a standstill.

So be it, he thought.

He shouted, ‘Yah!’ to spur his T-34 faster.

Take the shot, Valya.

Dimitri shoved his T-34 deeper into the Tiger.

He charged one last time into the enemy. He had no sword to swing and he did not wear the flapping cape of his clan but he spurred his mount and he saw his foe’s face. It was a white face, taut and skull-like. It was daubed with blood. It was Death’s face, sure enough, looking down on him over the rim of the Tiger’s turning turret.

The game T-34 rumbled around him, lunging hard against the Tiger. The two corpses on the tier behind him had settled and gone silent in the last seconds; they were dead and terribly done, and they appreciated his vengeance. But they did not recruit Dimitri, they left all decisions to him.

The Tiger’s turret kept turning, ticking more seconds. Dimitri was not alone here. He had his connection to his daughter. He was inside her spirit more than he ever was in Valentin’s. He’d lived well in her heart, housed and respected there, he had no worry for Katya the flyer, the rider.

Take the shot, boy. Before the Tiger’s turret swivels around the other side. I’ll stay here. This is my last saddle, I’ll stay in it.

Do it now.

Is there any link left between us, Valya? Hear me. Damn it, hear me, don’t let this Tiger leave the valley! Show me you hear me!

The Tiger’s turret was full broadside to the sunflower field now. The German commander lay on top of his tank as if to save it, to beg for its life.

Beg all you want, bastard. A Cossack tells you this.

Dimitri closed his eyes. He leaned forward in his seat, pressing his weight, too, into the Tiger, everything he was. Everything.

He drew a deep breath, tasting diesel smoke, metal shavings, blood, the holy steppe, life, and screamed out for victory.

‘Take the shot! Take the shot, boy! Yah! Take the shot!’

1015 hours

Luis had time in the air to look but too much pain to make sense of what he saw.

But he knew flame, that was heat. Red below him, black-veined, uncoiling. It reached for him, he sailed ahead of it. There was something else in the air with him, giant, a flipping tiddlywink, a great twisting lollipop.

Sound shut down and then there was no color. He was black but not so black that he was not light, flying in this body, all had slipped him, light and gravity.

He was black but fear welled out of it, congealed, a shadow deeper.

When the ground struck him he’d forgotten about the ground, so intimate was his soaring. He was shocked to stop, and lay aware only that he was still.

His senses stayed away, frightened off by his emptiness the way jackals avoid a fire. He lay with the fear only, because there was nothing else.

This was the hell he’d read about, he’d learned of in church. Fear, alone. It was horrible. Where was the door out, where was his death? He searched in his body for his death but that, too, eluded him. This was the second time looking for death and not finding it. Leningrad was the first, and now. Where? Here. Kursk.

Sound came back, his moan. Then light, fluttering, creeping back to him. He cracked open his eyes.

The blackness began to dispel. His fear did not leave right off but instead ran into his legs and arms, his chest, neck, and head, looking for reasons to stay, places to hide.

The Tiger burned in front of him. The T-34 jammed against it was also swallowed in gouts of fire and smoke; the two machines were catastrophic wrecks, melting together. The Tiger’s turret was gone, the hole where it had been was a volcano.

Heat from the blaze lapped at his cheeks. Luis rolled onto his back.

He looked up and did not see vastness, only the low, thick haze from rain and the battle still erupting. He listened and heard the lick of flames even louder than his heart. His body throbbed at him, almost rocking him in a sharpened cradle of pains, but the earth beneath him trembled even more with explosions and the heavy foot of war.

He lay alive, bleeding, broken in places. The battle had been taken from him, and that was all. He tried to be grateful, but that avoided him, as well.

Now that he had failed, everything averted itself from him. Destiny, God, even death.

Luis was again a pariah.

July 12 2110 hours Monbijou Bridge Berlin

The air-raid sirens began their city-wide wail.

Abram Breit did not turn around on the bridge across the river Spree to run back to the hospital. He did not run anywhere, his ribs hurt too much and his hips were still sore from his wild gallop on the Russian steppe to escape the crazy partisans. Bruises lined the insides of his thighs and he had a tender spot on his crown from being thumped in the field after the crash. After two days of rest, he’d signed out of the hospital. He intended to make his way to his rooms in his boarding house near the Zoological Gardens in Charlottenburg. The sirens surprised him but would not dissuade him from getting back to his own bed after his Russian adventure. Limping, he ran a hand along the bridge railing, looking up.

He headed south toward the Brandenburg Gate and Unter den Linden. He decided he would not seek shelter during the raid but would walk home through the open spaces of the Tiergarten. He wasn’t afraid to do this, and knew in a familiar place inside that he ought to be. Breit considered his new self, and hoped courage would not also make him stupid.

Just over the river Berliners were drawn out of their buildings by the sirens and into the streets and alleys, then down into the warrens under the city, the shelters and subway tunnels where they were ordered to go when the alarm sounded. Only uniformed soldiers were allowed out during a raid, everyone else was required to be in a shelter or risk arrest. The people, mostly women and elderly, were orderly, even bland, carting babies and food baskets. Hitler and Goebbels bleated constantly about the bravery of the homefront, how Germans would not succumb to these Anglo assaults. Breit noted some weeping among the people flowing by. That’s fine, he thought, you can still cry and be brave. I have done it recently.

After ten minutes walking with the howling horns, the first searchlights came on. Nothing showed at the far tips of their pillars. The drone of British Mosquito bombers vibrated over Berlin like metal clouds coming to shower bolts and nuts. It was an eerie noise, rattling out of the night like that, invisible, it struck Breit’s memory of the partisans, who, too, worked in the night. There was something unfair about this type of fighting, also something terrifying and effective, coming and going when right people should be finishing dinner, readying for bed. As if war were not terrible enough, Breit thought, it is also the ultimate inconvenience.

He reached the Brandenburg Gate and passed under it. He crossed the wide boulevard and entered the great park in the heart of Berlin. His rib cage and legs complained when he stumbled over a curb, not watching where he walked, his head tilted up to the crossing searchlights. The streets were almost empty now, bearing only the hee-haws of ambulances and fire trucks scrambling into position throughout the city. The Tiergarten was unlit except for the beams. The lights swept to and fro, making the shadows of the trees in the park sway and crawl over the ground, making the whole park teeter. Breit hobbled to a broad plat of grass and sat.

The first bombers buzzed over the city The evening was clear, searchlights rid the sky of stars. A dozen planes in the first echelon took the stars’ places, snared in the beams; the lights stopped their dizzying reel whenever they snared the trophy of a bomber. Breit stared up and saw these planes drop not bombs but flares, green sizzling signals for the ones behind to mark where they should drop their loads. The British did not bomb only factories and military targets. Hitler did not do so when he visited the skies over London, so this was fair, Breit decided, an ugly tit for tat. The flares drifted down on little chutes into the city’s center, over the Adlon Hotel, the burned-out Reichstag, Hitler’s Chancellery, the dense streets of offices and neighborhoods, and the Tiergarten. It was odd watching their slow fall, the invasion of bad tidings with a touch of sparkles, like holiday lights. Several flares landed in the park around Breit but he did not move to put them out.

Anti-aircraft stations opened up, punching at the Anglo bombers seen and unseen. There were many 88 mm gun emplacements throughout the city. Cannons stood on top of buildings like the IG Farben headquarters in Pariserplatz, there was one at the Red-White Tennis Club. The inner-city’s air defense was principally handled by three huge flak towers with eight big guns each. The towers were designed by Albert Speer, built in 1941: at the Zoological Gardens behind the bear cages, in Humbolthain Park, and in Friederichshain Park. These were massive fortresses, intended by Speer to inspire faith among Berliners. They were gun batteries, as well as bunkers and communications towers, but also castles, almost medieval, meant to be the first of the new buildings for Germania, Hitler’s city of the future that would replace Berlin after the war. Breit listened to the three giant bastions open up, heard the woof of smaller guns around the city. Beneath the guns and the sirens was the piping of tumbling British bombs.

The initial barrages landed south of the park, on Wilmersdorf and Shoneberg, residential districts. The first bombs were incendiary, meant to start fires to light the way better for the waves of bombers following, the ones with the big payloads. Berlin was to be handed the butcher’s bill tonight for the Reich’s failure in Russia. The British wagged a finger in Hitler’s face. More fire bombs landed around the city, north and east of Breit, in Mitte over the administrative offices of the Reich, along the river Spree, perhaps on the hospital Breit had just left. The city tried to make itself dark, blast curtains hung over every window, every light was doused, even those of the emergency vehicles running crazy in the erupting streets, but the fire bombs did their work. Berlin burned for them, accommodating the bombers with wooden roofs, kindled ancient spires and domes, blown-open gas lines, flaming cars and trucks, scorching grass. An ignited wind crossed Breit’s nostrils, the smells of carbon and fuel. He wrapped his knees in his arms, the instinct was to be small.

Once the city was on fire, the British drone above swelled. Ranks of bombers powered into range, the searchlights went wild with them. The sound was apocalyptic, Breit had never heard anything like this. The sky, as immense as it had been in Russia, seemed even larger this night over Germany, venting the noise of what must have been a thousand bombers. Then came the whistles.

Breit steeled himself, waiting, staring into the trilling night. The searchlights flashed left and right until they caught sight of the falling bombs. The things rushed down through the beams, packed so thick as to be preposterous, they were no more than small gray points in the searchlights but looked like a bed of nails descending on the city. Then the first burst of them landed.

Breit gasped. The explosions raised fireballs in the city. The flames that had come first danced a sort of glee, like demons welcoming the greater members of their kind to the ground. He watched the entire city under onslaught, a carpet of carnage in every direction. Buildings disappeared in great spouts of blaze and concussion. Places Breit knew, that he could erect in his mind from memory, were scythed to their foundations under the bombs, hammered into shards of stone, broken brick and melted glass, scored timbers. Bombs fell, too, in the Tiergarten. The closest landed a hundred meters from him. Trees became torches, the soil trembled under him. Anti-aircraft batteries emptied themselves straight up at the English, adding their own sharp bits to the night. He made no move to go. He studied the bombardment, every part of it. He listened to the many peals of the attack; soon, the bombs, guns, and sirens blended into one long and unremitting rumble, like a bolt of lightning that would not end.

With every explosion, Breit adjusted his image of Berlin. He blacked out structures and destroyed whole blocks on his mental map table, reshaping the city with the bombs. By dawn Berlin would be changed; how much depended on the firefighters and luck. Breit tried to regard the bombs as allies; wasn’t this attack on civilians something for him to cheer for? But just as he was unable to appreciate the Red partisans – they were brutes to him – these English bombs were horrors. That was the lesson tonight. Everything in war, even destruction and killing that serves your own ends, is horrible.

In an hour, the British were spent. They flew away, and the guns firing up at them silenced. Breit could not tell how many planes there had been, or how many of them had been shot down. No matter. The German city they left behind crackled and simmered under a rising, flickering haze. The raid was English vengeance. Breit listened to them fade away west. The British are a cold people when angry, he thought. Not like the Russians, so hot to spill blood. And we Germans, what are we? We’re the worst. We believe war is glorious.

Breit rose. His legs and ribs hurt worse now. The adrenaline of the raid had kept him in a clench for an hour. When the tension released he was sore from head to toe. The Tiergarten was not on fire. The park was a dark oasis inside a ring of burning city.

He walked south to Charlottenburg, to see if his boarding house survived. He didn’t dwell with worry that it would be standing or not. Abram Breit had been transformed by Citadel. He was a historic figure, he’d effected the result of a massive and pivotal battle. Those pages in history would always bear his imprint, if not his name. Germany would lose this war now. Breit possessed more power than the Führer because he had changed the outcome and Hitler no longer could.

Breit ignored the aches in his body. He searched for an avenue where there was fire and smoke, the sounds of Berlin licking its wounds, patching itself up. He wanted to see how bad things were. He wanted to watch Germans put out flames, dig though rubble, save their city and nation, do what he’d been trying to do.

He crossed the Landwehr Canal to Lützow Plaza. A vapor cloud shimmered with firelight. Water cannons hissed and bucket brigades shouted. Bells clanged on the rushing fire trucks. Breit headed toward the ruckus.

He rounded a corner to a street half in conflagration, half threatened. Several hundred Berliners rushed up and down, each with a task, a bucket, a hose, an axe, a child protected in a skirt, a megaphone. Another two fire trucks raced past, furiously tolling their bells. People leaped out of the way to let them through. Breit followed in the wake of the second truck. He was an SS colonel, no one denied him passage right up to the flames.

He walked so close to the worst building that the heat began to dry the water in his eyeballs. It was a tall stone house, three stories high with an Italian facade. Every window was licked by shoots of flame, this building could not be rescued. Several fire trucks were arrayed along the block, spraying hoses to contain the spread of fire. Breit noted the house next to the doomed one was not yet burning. None of the firefighters paid any attention to it, their water and ladders were aimed at the buildings next to it and across the street. Breit approached a fire brigade officer directing the two trucks that had just arrived. The new men were fast deploying their forces on the opposite side of the street.

The officer saw Breit coming and nodded but kept directing the crews. Breit did not lag back at the man’s curt acknowledgment. This was a fire scene, the SS had little jurisdiction here. He drew close to the officer, a fire captain, a red-jowled man Breit’s age.

‘Captain,’ he had to shout over the din, ‘Captain!’

The fire officer turned only his head to answer Breit. ‘Colonel, I’m quite busy, as you see.’

Breit had to yank to turn him. ‘Captain, why are your men not spraying this building?’ He pointed at the house next to the one burning faster now. ‘It’s not on fire yet. You can save it.’

The officer shook his head, his mouth curled in a rebuke. ‘This was a Jew house, Colonel. Jews lived there.’

Breit stared. The captain must have figured he did not understand.

‘We’ll let it burn.’

‘Put your hoses on it,’ Breit ordered.

‘No,’ the officer answered. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, Colonel.’

With this the captain turned away and trod forward, pointing and bellowing at the firefighters under his command. Breit was left standing behind, gazing up at the face of the Jew house. It was big, all the houses on this block were sizable, these were the homes of the well-to-do. He wondered if the Jews of this home on this street had owned paintings.

He turned from the fire and walked to a policeman.

He held out his hand.

‘Officer, give me your sidearm.’

The policeman, seeing Breit’s black and silver uniform, did as he was ordered. Breit took the pistol.

He came up behind the fire captain.

He pushed the barrel of the pistol into the shoulder of the fire captain’s tunic.

Breit repeated his command. ‘Put your hoses on that house.’

‘Look,’ the captain, starting to turn, said, ‘I told you…’

Breit fired.

The man jolted and spun from the gun. The report of the shot was devoured in the roar of flames and water. No one moved toward Breit to disarm him, no one heard or perhaps even saw what he’d done. The captain doubled over. When he came up, his hand was clamped over the hole drilled clean through his shoulder. Breit let the gun hang. The fire captain had a new look on his face.

‘Put your hoses on that building, captain. And when you’ve put out these fires, Berlin will have one more building instead of one less.’

The fire captain glared. He was a tough man, but not so much that he dared another word. He straightened, his eyes fixed on Breit, he did not wince. Breit had no idea what to do with the pistol now, he had no holster for it, and he did not want to tuck it in his belt like a tough guy or the partisans. He walked back to the policeman and returned it. He would not need it again. The fire captain turned his water on the Jew house and soaked it, saving it from the gobbling flames of its burning German neighbor.

Breit stayed for an hour, retiring into the crowd until all the fires on this block were extinguished. He walked fifteen minutes more to his own street, arriving just before midnight. His boarding house was fine, the bombs had missed his neighborhood. No one was outside, no one saw him come home.

July 16 2240 hours German troop train five kilometers south of Belgorod

Luis set another cracker on his tongue. He closed his lips around it and sucked, waiting for the wafer to become mush. He gazed out his window at the vast plains and swallowed salty pulp.

With his left hand he raised a glass of water. Even the glass was a misery to lift, the broken ribs on his left side stabbed him. His right arm was no use to him, it was wrapped in a heavy plaster cast, limp in a black sling. He chased the cracker down his throat with little gulps, the five stitches in his chin bleated every time he stretched his jaw to eat or speak. Because of the stitches and the gauze around his head to hold the bandage in place, he ate little. This kept his appetite inflamed. The busted ribs made it hard to drink. Luis stayed hungry and thirsty every waking second now. He made no conversation with the other soldiers in the passenger car who passed his seat, men who saw his wincing efforts to move and offered to help in some way. He grunted in Spanish at the doctor who checked on him and the porter who brought him baskets of bread that went stale waiting for him to eat; the hard mouthings of German made his head hurt, so he stuck to his smoother mother tongue and didn’t care if they understood.

The man across from him had sat down only a minute ago and already prattled on. He’d put on such a happy face at seeing Luis on this train leaving Belgorod. Luis answered him with a nod at the padded seat across from him and regretted the offer within seconds. He let the man’s words flow past, like the night steppe outside the train, going by and going by, with no more meaning than that, just lost things. He did not turn his head to the fat officer sweating in the seat, the man’s knees were too close, they knocked Luis’s sore shins whenever the train rattled. Luis laid one more cracker on his tongue and closed his eyes.

‘I’ll tell you, I’m not sorry to see the last of Belgorod,’ Major Grimm said. ‘I think I must have smoked two packs a day without ever lighting one cigarette, being cooped up with Colonel Breit like that. Oh! Did you hear about his adventure with the partisans…?’

Luis did not need to look at the chatty man, he smelled the perspiration, could hear the officer’s hands run over his belly across the stale cloth of his uniform, even through the torrent of talk. In the imposed stillness of his injuries, Luis was turning inward. He found a soothing darkness there, the darkness that first came to him bleeding in the snow at Leningrad and came again beside his burning Tiger at Prokhorovka, and now on his way out of Russia, headed south for Italy, it seemed not to leave.

‘…meant to check on you in the hospital at Belgorod when I heard you’d been brought in,’ the major rambled, ‘but there was so much to do in the last several days, you understand, Captain. Besides, I’m sure you were in a great deal of pain and needed…’

Luis had made himself stand on the battlefield. He’d been thwarted in Russia but he would not lie like a skewered bull in his own blood. He’d survived the destruction of his tank, a fantastic blast when the Red shooter’s shell pierced his Tiger’s side armor; a secondary explosion ignited when all the stored rounds went off in the Tiger and the T-34. Everyone died instantly, except Luis. He’d been blown into the air on top of the Tiger’s flying turret. When he landed he was somehow alive.

He’d rolled over on his back and raised a hand to God, one last prayer, certain he was about to die. When he did not, there was no more reason to lie there, nothing to wait for. The pain propelled him to his feet. He was in awe again of his flimsy body, what it could endure. Even more than the burning Tiger, it seemed. A Mark IV in his company spotted him and ferried him out of the valley.

‘…you were fighting at Prokhorovka, the Americans landed 160,000 men on Sicily, and six hundred tanks. That, of course, changed everything. Hitler’s obsessed that Mussolini is going to be overthrown. He summoned von Manstein and Kluge to Rastenburg for a meeting. And on the thirteenth, of course, while you were in the hospital, Hitler called off Citadel.’

Yes, Luis thought, Hitler has taken Russia from me. With it, he’s taken Spain. I can’t go home.

Tomorrow Hitler will order the rest of Leibstandarte out of Russia. So I am to be given Italy next. And the Americans for an enemy. Bueno. What do I care? What hasn’t been taken from me?

‘…Papa Hoth, as you can imagine, was furious and wanted to keep up the attack. Hitler agreed to let the battle in the south go on for a few more days, you know, to try and siphon off the last of the Russians’ reserves. But that was destined to be no good at all, you see. And then today, the Russians started their counteroffensive in the north against Orel. Early reports have the Reds already across poor Model’s first defense lines…’

Luis had begun to mutter curt replies, ‘Yes,’ ‘Hmm,’ ‘Really?’ He issued these like boulders or downed trees to try and stem the flow of the major, wanting to dam him up with a blunt, final word.

The porter walked by with a pitcher of water swathed in a white kerchief, the thing looked as bandaged as Luis. He refilled Luis’s glass and handed Grimm a full glass. The major downed the water with one swift raise of his arm, the arm that did nothing at Kursk but push toy blocks and lift sheets of paper. Grimm swallowed and said, ‘Ahhh,’ with satisfaction. Under his tunic Luis’s rib cage was wrapped tight. Every breath for him was a task. He glowered at the officer. The fat man would not be plugged.

‘…problems began with Totenkopf on your left flank. The hope was they would advance far enough to threaten Prokhorovka from the northwest. But the rain made a mess of their river crossings, and resupplying the division across the Psel became impossible. Totenkopf couldn’t hold their beachhead and had to fall back.’

Luis imagined Grimm in the map room sliding the black blocks backward. He wondered how long until the glass of water Grimm had just gulped ran down his forehead as sweat. The darkness outside his window and inside him was emptiness. Luis looked at this man, his opposite, and considered how full Grimm was, how bursting with noise and memory and need. Look at him, swollen with it all, talking just to keep from popping. The dark required none of this from Luis. The dark was pain, and if you embraced the dark’s pain you felt nothing of the world’s. That was real power.

‘…Kempf, but too little too late. Kempf’s linkup with Das Reich didn’t come until the fifteenth. By then, for all intents and purposes, the battle was over. Oh, you SS chaps might have made a go of it, certainly, but with due respect, Captain, Leibstandarte’s inability to take Oktyabrski state farm in the center doomed the attack. Neither Totenkopf nor Das Reich could defend their flanks after that. By the night of the thirteenth, Prokhorovka was a stalemate. That’s when Hitler called it off. And now the damn Ivans are hitting back. Well, it’s to be expected. It’s what I’d do. It’s only a matter of time, I’m afraid…’

Late that afternoon a nurse had come to Luis’s bedside. She’d handed him orders to report to this train at the Belgorod station. Apparently Grimm got the same orders. Luis was being sent to defend another yappy fat man, Mussolini. Luis would recuperate in Rome, then take over a panzer company. He would get another Tiger in the sunny south, in a coastal town named Anzio.

‘…put you in for a medal, you know. The Iron Cross Second Class. I heard about all the Red tanks you knocked out in that damn sunflower field. Splendid, Captain. You deserve it! And since this is the second time you’ve been wounded in battle, you’ll be getting your silver wound badge…’

Luis heard the talk of medals the way a man listens to the plops of stones landing at the darkness of a well. He dropped the medals into the darkness, plop, plop. They were not enough to give him back Barcelona, the Ramblas, his father. He was starting over. In Italy.

He watched Russia recede in his window. Adios. The moonlit flats were heaped with Grimm’s assessments of failure here, describing the expanse as impregnable, no one had ever conquered it for long. Maybe he’s right, Luis thought. Perhaps it was better to get out of here and head south. He thought about Prokhorovka. What had happened? What in hell was that old T-34 driver screaming at the end? What was he saying? What did he want?

Luis licked his dry lips. A dart of pain pricked in his stitched chin. The pain swept the Red driver out of his head, out into the bland deluge of Major Grimm’s monologue. Luis didn’t care what the crazy old Russian had been yelling. Whatever it was, Death had answered him. The Russian was not going to haunt Luis, there would be no more throbs in his hand like the partisan or the bulls, no. The darkness in Luis left no room for the weakness of curiosity, no dilution of the mind or will, no pride, and certainly no ghosts.

Stay empty, the dark told him. See how powerful you have become. It’s simple: first the bullet outside Leningrad, then that crazy old Russian at Prokhorovka. They were sent to you, to change you and make you stronger.

You have nothing.

You are nothing, nothing but la Daga.

It will take something stronger than Russia to kill you.

July 16 2350 hours fifty kilometers north of Khar’kov Ukraine/Russian border

Colonel Plokhoi was first out of the bushes. A moment after the blast on the rail mound, before the echo was gone from the trees where they hid, he ran from cover with his submachine-gun braced at the hip, chasing his bullets over the open ground. Katya leaped out with the waves of dark partisans, following Colonel Bad, shouting and shooting their weapons into the roofs and sides of the tipping train.

The locomotive careened off the splintered rails and continued on, teetering on its betrayed wheels until it crashed over. Momentum carried it another twenty meters on its side until it plowed to a halt in the scarred earth. The locomotive lay on its side steaming and hot, a ridiculous posture for a great machine. There it lay dying in gushes. It was ignored by Plokhoi and his swarming partisans, who dashed for the five passenger cars. The locomotive had dragged each of the cars off the blown tracks, so that the entire train spilled down the rail mound into a heaped jumble. Smoke roiled from the C-3 explosion and the dirt spewed into the night air, and now the barrels of many weapons added their gunsmoke. Bullets punched holes in the cars’ thin frames, paint chipped and bare metal halos showed around every puncture. Partisans ran close and tossed grenades into the shattered windows. The blasts shook the downed cars again, fabric inside began to burn. The partisans stepped back and fired, fired, fired into the cars. Katya lowered her rifle. She hadn’t shot it more than twice, she’d seen little need to add her small bark to the furious baying of Plokhoi’s men.

Three machine-guns were hustled forward and flung down on tripods. When they opened up the sound was like hail, ting ting ting ting, faster than a drum roll. The machine-guns shredded everything in front of them, the shooters swiveled the barrels back and forth without aim, loaders lavished them with belts of ammunition. The partisans emptied their guns into the German train. The night glimmered to the constellation of muzzle flashes, all else was black and grisly. Nothing answered from the cars themselves, not even screams. Where was the time to scream or shout to surrender? The soldiers who’d been asleep awoke to the shock of their world tilting, they tumbled off their seats and benches, dashed against shifting walls and railings, then danced on the strings of these ten thousand bullets fired by a hundred angry fighters who had no interest in taking prisoners.

Katya ran close to Plokhoi. The partisan leader shouted with his trigger pressed, until his magazine was emptied. He dropped the spent gun on the ground and stood spent as well, out of breath and bullets at the same time, a perfection for him.

Plokhoi fired a flare pistol into the air. When the green light struck, everyone quit shooting. Katya gazed into the rent darkness of the besieged cars. Nothing came from them, no light or sound, not even a creak. They were dead, when seconds before they’d been steaming past, headed out of Russia. Now they would stay. The only noise left to the night was the locomotive sighing, sounding sad for this carnage. Katya stepped forward, past Plokhoi, to do her job. She was joined by Ivan, Josef, and Leonid.

The rest of the partisans receded into the trees without a word. This massacre required nothing more from them. The three machine-guns were lifted off their tripods and hauled back. Plokhoi held his ground, standing over the cooling weapon at his feet.

‘You’ve got five minutes.’

Josef answered, ‘Yes, sir,’ into the darkness feathering around the partisan leader.

Katya slipped her hand under Leonid’s elbow. ‘You shouldn’t be here, Leonya. It’s too soon.’

‘Shit,’ he grunted, leaning on her arm to keep up. ‘So this is what fighting on your feet is like. No wonder we became pilots.’ A rifle hung in his free hand. She’d never seen him carry a gun before.

Katya hurried Leonid as much as his healing injuries allowed over the last of the open ground. Ivan and Josef went ahead, reaching the first of the passenger cars. Josef peeked inside through the sieve that was made of the roof, then moved to the second fallen car. When Katya and Leonid caught up at the third car, Ivan had boosted Josef over the perforated roof onto the tilted side. The old man walked along the row of blasted-out windows, peering down into the shambles inside, gripping a ready pistol. Katya gaped at the number of holes in the car, amazed that the remaining metal did not buckle under his weight.

‘Alright,’ Josef said to the three of them waiting. ‘This one will do.’

With that, he disappeared, lowering himself into the bowels of the car. Katya would not let herself imagine what he landed on, what he walked among.

Josef’s voice strained through the perforations in the roof.

‘Someone get up on top. Let’s go!’

Ivan pulled from his ever-present backpack four muslin sacks. He tossed them to Leonid, then moved close to the car. He linked the fingers of both hands to make a step.

‘Up, Witch,’ the big soldier said to her.

Katya jerked back at the notion. ‘Me? No. Ivan, you go. We’ll stay down here. No.’

‘And who’s going to give me a boost? You? Maybe Lumanov? Come on. Up.’

‘He has a point,’ Leonid said.

Josef growled inside. ‘Now.’

Katya slung her rifle across her back and stepped into Ivan’s hands. The big man heaved and she rose easily to land her boots on the side of the car.

Josef’s hand speared up through a broken window. He hoisted a machine pistol.

Katya took the German weapon and tossed it down to Leonid. The pilot caught the gun and gave it over to Ivan, who rammed it into a sack.

Josef scavenged among the scattered Germans for their guns, ammunition, and money. She watched from above, aghast at first at the piled corpses. There were seventy men or more, black blooded in the light of a full moon. In the first minute, Josef lifted up a dozen weapons. His hand thrust out of the windows and grew more stained with each rifle or pistol. Katya’s hands grew slick with blood. Josef kicked through the bodies like trash, he waded in them and walked on them, tripped and fell among them without a curse or any word, as grim as any of the dead.

By the second minute, the killed mounds at the bottom of the car were nothing to Katya. They were merely arms and legs to be pried out of the way by the dark walker Josef to get at their only worth. She tossed the weapons down to Leonid and watched him stagger to catch them, his legs still bad, his shoulders not recovered. She reveled in Leonid’s life, and the fact that she had saved him. The heaps of German dead, by comparison, became just loose figurines. Katya felt this change, a twinge in her gut, something soft stiffened. This is war, she decided, war. She fixed her eyes on Josef. She watched the old man walk through the dead, doing what he had to do. Papa, too, shirked nothing that needed to be done. She wanted to be like that as well, and he could teach her. Katya felt strongly the need to talk with him. She sensed her father was too far away and made herself a promise to write him a letter tomorrow. With that, Papa felt closer.

Ivan called up that their time was running out. Josef heard this and thrashed around the bodies for a last check of weapons. She walked above the old man’s head, tracking him while he made his way to the front of the passenger car. There only two bodies lay. By their uniforms and their privacy in the car, these two seemed to be officers. One of the officers was high ranking, a fat man, a big target for the machine-guns and riddled with bullets. The other lay on his back. This one was in a sling with a broken arm, his gaunt face was framed by a gauze wrap. He wore black and silver, an SS officer like Colonel Breit. Katya had never seen an SS officer before. He was horrid looking, white and gossamer thin, the gauze and cast made him even paler, already a ghost even before he was turned into one by the partisans. She shivered to look at him, that place in her that was hardening somehow did not defend her against this one. He was different, not German, what was he? Barely human, thin like a blade. Josef rifled the body’s belt for a holstered Luger pistol. He handed the gun up to Katya. She did not take her eyes off the corpse while Josef clambered on a bench to climb out.

Below, Ivan had divided the weapons among the four satchels. He lapped the fullest one over his back and turned to make for the trees. Leonid struggled with the smallest sack, loaded only with papers and ammo clips.

Josef came up on the deck beside her. Katya held on to the Luger.

Josef slung himself to the ground. He lifted a hand to help her down.

Below, someone moaned. Katya glanced down into the dark recesses, into the piles of upturned and stolen life. One thing moved. The SS man, a gaunt white thing in silver and black, the body of a knife.

Katya lowered the Luger and fired. The thin body settled back.

It was wrong to leave anything alive in this train, that was what Plokhoi had come for. To kill all of them, even the ones leaving Russia, to send that message. She fired again, to do what she had to. Josef glared up at her. Ivan and Leonid stopped with the sacks over their backs and turned to look.

The pistol smoked in Katya’s hand. A gray spirit trickled from the barrel and drifted past her face – smelling of oiled things, machines, and leather – then moved on.