Red Army

Sixteen

Major Bezarin wanted to move. He felt his resentment swelling toward genuine anger as the hours burned away. Propped up in the commander’s hatch of his tank, he focused on the tiny bead of light that marked the rear of the tank ahead of his own. It was still too dark to discriminate the shapes, but Bezarin could feel the other tanks stopped in the road ahead of him and behind him, a mighty concentration of power not only wasted at the moment, but, worse still, at risk in their compact, stationary mass. Bezarin had been allowed no choice in the positioning of his battalion. The regiment’s chief of staff had halted the column without warning, telling Bezarin simply to close up and await further orders. When Bezarin asked if he could deploy off the road into dispersed tactical positions, the chief of staff had brusquely dismissed the idea with the remark that this was no time for nonsense, that the entire regiment had to be prepared to resume movement on a few minutes’ notice. And with the reminder that the directive remained in effect limiting radio use to monitoring only, the chief of staff had gone to tuck in the trail battalion.

Bezarin imagined that he could feel the heavy iron breath of his tanks, his steel stallions aching to break loose. Even with the engines cut, the pungent smell of exhaust hung on in the low-lying roadway, corrupting the cool morning air. To move, to fight, was to have a chance. But it was exasperating, a terrible thing, to be forced to wait without any information. According to the books, Bezarin knew he was supposed to be planning for his commitment and preparing his companies. But he had received no word on where or when or under what circumstances his tanks would enter the battle. He had forced his company commanders to inspect each of their vehicles for its readiness, then he had discussed abstract options with them. But finally, he had realized that he was only robbing them of sleep. Now he waited alone for the fateful radio transmission, or for a courier to ride down along the column, searching for the command tanks. But the radio remained silent, and the only sound was of the occasional tanker dismounting to relieve himself by the side of the road. Beyond the local envelope of silence, the ceaseless war sounds grumped in the distance, teasing him. It reminded him of waiting in the lobby at a film theater, listening to the muffled sound track hint at the drama behind the closed doors of the auditorium. From left to right, the horizon glowed as though the edge of the world had caught fire, flickering in slow motion, then flashing like a photographer’s bulb, streaking the running clouds with gypsy colors. Bezarin wanted to enter that world of testing and decision before he could begin to doubt himself in earnest.

His feeling of helplessness was aggravated by the memory of his unit’s canal crossing near Salzgitter the evening before. The flagmen had waved the vehicles onto the tactical bridging at regulation intervals, and the only signs of war were a few burned-out hulks from the day’s battle. The tone of action, even the sense of urgency, was reminiscent of a demonstration exercise at which a very important observer was present, nothing more. Then, without warning, the canal exploded with fire, heaving tanks, bridging, water, and flames into an inscrutable sky. No one knew exactly what had happened, but Bezarin lost an entire tank platoon and, by sheer chance, his battalion chief of staff and operations officer. Since he had already been forced to send forward two officers to replace losses in committed units, the loss was a sharp blow, burdening him with the need to compensate personally for the cadre shortfall. At the same time, he had surprised himself by thinking frankly that he was glad he had not grown closer to any of the men who had been killed.

The unit had been quickly rerouted over an alternate bridge. But the incident felt like a warning — and a personal challenge to Bezarin. Then, in the growing darkness and confusion, they had been diverted well to the south as the attack up ahead bogged down again. The fatal crossing had been unnecessary. Now he and his tanks waited on a sunken road at the edge of a wood in Germany. Bezarin had not expected too much of Lieutenant Colonel Tarashvili, the regiment’s commander. But it seemed outrageous that he had sent no word, no information on the situation whatsoever.

A compact figure vaulted up onto the deck of Bezarin’s tank, almost slipping on the clutter of newly added reactive armor. The movement took Bezarin by surprise, isolated as he was in his thoughts and his padded tanker’s helmet. But he quickly sensed a familiar presence. He canted his helmet back so he could hear.

The visitor was Senior Lieutenant Roshchin, commander of the Fifth Company, Second Battalion — Bezarin’s youngest and least-experienced company commander. Bezarin had kept close to Roshchin’s company during the deployment and march, nursing him along. Yet there was something about the boyish lieutenant that brought out Bezarin’s temper. He found himself barking at Roshchin over small oversights or inconsequential misunderstandings, and his own lack of self-control only made him angrier still. Through it all, Roshchin reacted with servility and a few mumbled excuses. The boy had the feel of a spaniel addicted to his master’s beatings.

Even now, Bezarin almost shouted at the lieutenant to get back to his company. But he captured the words while they were still forming on his lips. Roshchin, he realized clearly, would be nervous, frightened, unsure. Universal human emotions, as Anna would have called them.

“Comrade Commander,” Roshchin said, “any word?”

The simple question seemed unforgivably inane to Bezarin, but he was determined to be decent toward the boy.

“Nothing. How’s your company doing?”

“Oh, the same, thank you, Comrade Commander. Most of the men are sleeping. Always one crew member on lookout, though, just like the regulations say.” He huddled closer to Bezarin, who could smell the night staleness of the boy’s breath now. “The march was exhausting; you’re all shaken to bits by the time you stop.” Bezarin could feel the lieutenant searching through the darkness for a sign of human solidarity, but he could not find the right words to soothe the boy. “I couldn’t sleep, myself,” Roshchin went on. “I really want to do everything right. I’ve been going over my lessons in my head.”

A number of sharp retorts bolted through Bezarin’s mind. Roshchin was a graduate of the Kasan tank school, renowned for the poor quality of its alumni. Bezarin painted in the lieutenant’s features from memory. Short, like virtually every tanker. A blond saw blade of hair across the forehead, and the small sculpted nose you saw on certain women with Polish blood. There was neither crispness nor presence to Roshchin, and Bezarin worried over how the lieutenant would perform in combat.

“The war must be going well,” the lieutenant said, his voice clearly asking for confirmation.

It was as though Roshchin studied to say things that permitted no reasonable reply, as though his every utterance demanded that Bezarin make a fool of him.

“Of course it’s going well,” Bezarin responded, forcing the words out, sounding stilted to himself, a bad actor with a poor script.

“I wish I could have a cigarette. One smoke,” Roshchin said.

“When it’s light.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to send letters soon?”

Anna. And the letters unwritten, the words unsaid. A remembrance impossibly foreign to the moment.

“Soon, I’m sure,” Bezarin said.

“I’ve written four already,” Roshchin said. “Natalya loves to get letters. I’ve numbered them on the envelopes so that she’ll know what order to read them in, even if they all arrive at once.”

Bezarin wanted to ask the lieutenant when on earth he had had time to write love letters. But he kept to his resolve to behave decently. It suddenly occurred to him that this boy might not be alive for more than a few hours. And that he had a young wife who meant as much to him as… Bezarin switched mental tracks, recalling Roshchin’s pride in displaying the stupid-faced bridal snapshot taken by some hung-over staff photographer in a cavernous wedding palace, where marriages were matters of scheduling and norms as surely as were military operations. The stiff, unknowing smiles in the snapshot had made Bezarin unreasonably jealous as the lieutenant insisted on showing them to his new commander.

“I suppose… that you miss her,” Bezarin said, measuring out the words.

“How could I not miss her?” Roshchin answered. “She’s a wonderful girl. The best.” There was new life in the lieutenant’s voice now.

“And… how does she like army life?”

“Oh, she’ll get used to it,” Roshchin said cheerfully. “It takes time, you know. Really, you should marry, Comrade Commander. It’s a wonderful state of affairs.”

Advice from this naive, clumsy lieutenant was almost too much for Bezarin to bear. But he let it roll off.

“You should go and get a little sleep,” Bezarin told the boy. “I don’t want you to be exhausted. We’ll get into the fight today.”

“Do you really think so?”

If we’re not caught in this stinkhole of a forest, lined up like perfect targets on a damned road, Bezarin thought.

“I’m sure of it. And I want you at your best.”

“I won’t let you down, Comrade Commander. I wouldn’t want Natalya to be ashamed of me.”

Leave me, Bezarin thought. Get out of here, you son of a bitch.

“You’ll do fine,” Bezarin said. “Now get back to your company.”

The first morning light had crept up on the two officers during their talk. To Bezarin, the mist wrapping loosely around the trees resembled dirty bandages.

“Go on,” Bezarin repeated with forced affability. “I’ll wake you in plenty of time.”

The lieutenant saluted. Something in the alacrity of it made Bezarin feel as though the boy were saluting a grizzled old general, or his father. Well, I’m not that old, Bezarin thought. Not quite. Thirty-one isn’t old enough to be the father of a senior lieutenant.

For an instant, the terrible responsibility he had for the lives of his men glimmered in front of Bezarin. Then the vision evaporated into more conditioned and customary forms of thought. But the morning felt suddenly damp, and his head ached. He repositioned his tanker’s helmet. They said that the close-fitting headgear made you go bald, if the war went on too long. What would Anna think of him with a bald pate? And what did she think of him, anyway? Did she think of him at all now? He remembered how she had liked to touch his hair. With one specific, unchanging gesture. No, a bald head would not do. My captain, she said. My fierce warrior captain. But he was a major now, and she was part of history.

Anna liked the birches when their small leaves went the color of old copper. One by one, the leaves deserted as the northern wind probed and gathered force. Then a gusting assault tore them away by the hundreds, revealing the silver-white fragility of the limbs. He remembered the feel of the buttons on a woman’s dress. And if I see her again. If ever I see her again…

Bezarin smiled mockingly at himself. You can tell her you were supposed to be commanding a tank battalion on the edge of a battle and you thought of laying her ass down in some borrowed apartment.

But his practiced cynicism did not work to its full potential now. He attempted to turn his thoughts back to his duty. Yet he knew that she would be there now, just beyond the edge of his vision. That one time in his life he had been truly afraid. Terrified to ask a thin, laughing girl with hair the color of pouring brandy if she would marry him. Because she laughed so easily when they were alone, and he knew he loved her helplessly and that he could bear losing her more easily than he could have borne her laughter in that unarmed instant. In the subtle light he could see the broad steel shoulders of his tanks taking shape up along the road, and it struck him as absurd that he should be allowed to command such lethal machines when he could not bring himself to risk the wound of a girl’s decision.

The radio spoke.

Bezarin recognized the voice of the regiment’s commander, passing a brevity code. Bezarin scrambled to copy the message, then to break it out using the sheets he kept in his breast pocket.

Movement. In ten minutes.

The time was unreasonably short after so long a wait. Bezarin hoped he could wake everyone and get all of the engines started in time. It would have been better to warm the engines slowly, since they had been sitting for several hours. Bezarin thought that he would have been wiser to have been readying his force instead of indulging in reveries. But the past was unalterable, and he forced himself to concentrate on the present.

Twenty-six tanks and a bedraggled motorized rifle company. Bezarin shouted at his crew to get their gear on and start up the tank, then he hoisted himself out of the commander’s hatch. It required an awkward maneuver to slip down over the jewel boxes of reactive armor that had been bolted onto the tank, and Bezarin hit the ground flat-footed, jolting himself fully awake. He ran along the column, shouting to the officers, nagged by a small, cranky worry over additional mechanical breakdowns. He found that the prospect of moving toward the battle did not bother him at all but filled him with unexpected and even unreasonable energy. He was delighted to find that he was not afraid when it mattered. Only scared of the girls, he decided.

The regiment’s route, studded with traffic controllers, led them through the wreckage of earlier fighting. It was possible to reconstruct much of how the battle had gone from the position of the hulks. In one broad field, a Soviet tank company had been ambushed in battle formation. The burned-out wrecks formed an almost perfect line of battle. Bezarin felt certain that, somehow, he would never let that happen to his battalion, but he wondered simultaneously at the effect such a sight must have on his men as they rolled by with their hatches open.

The enemy appeared to be exclusively British, which both surprised and disappointed Bezarin. He had always pictured himself fighting the Americans or the West Germans. Now he wondered if his unit had not been shunted into a secondary sector, a sideshow. He felt punished by the lack of information from higher headquarters.

There were plenty of ruined British vehicles in evidence, even though visibility remained limited to a few hundred meters on either side of the road. But the obviously larger number of slaughtered vehicle carcasses from Soviet units annoyed Bezarin. The level of destruction appeared to have been terrible on both sides, but the losses were clearly not in balance. Bezarin soon stopped counting and comparing, consoling himself with the smoldering conviction that he would do better.

The British had died mostly in defensive positions, although here and there you could tell that a specific element had waited too long to pull off its position and had been caught in the open. One chaotic intermingling told the story of a local counterattack. The residue of battle left a bitter taste, as though neither side had shown the least mercy.

Bezarin blamed the superior quantitative performance of the British on technology. Of all the fears that intermittently gripped the Soviet officer corps, Bezarin knew that the greatest was of the technological edge the NATO armies possessed, all Party propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. Often, the fear bordered on paranoia, with worries about secret weapons that NATO might have concealed for sudden employment on the first day of the war. Bezarin saw no evidence for wonder weapons now, but he cursed the mystifying superiority of the Western models of standard battlefield equipment.

One curious aspect of the battlefield was how few bodies were in evidence. Occasionally, a cluster of dead sprawled in a burned fringe around a combat vehicle or lay half-crushed along the roadway. But the greater effect was as if the battle had been a contest of machines, a tournament of systems, with only a handful of human puppeteers. That was an illusion, Bezarin knew. A troubling percentage of the stricken Soviet tanks had their turrets blown completely off. The hulls lay about like decapitated beasts. No crew member could survive such a catastrophic effect. When they died, the great steel animals devoured their human contents, as if in a last act of vengeance.

The last of the morning ground fog clung to the woodlines like decayed flesh slowly loosening from bones. The sky remained overcast, but the heaviness was gone, and the last gray would burn off as the sun climbed higher. Bezarin scanned the grayness. He could already hear the aircraft ripping by just above the visual ceiling. There was no way of telling whose aircraft these were, and Bezarin feared the impending clarity of the day. The march column moved swiftly, except for the odd accordion stop when a traffic controller faced a dilemma for which his orders had not prepared him. Yet Bezarin wanted them to go faster, to push the vehicles to the limit of their speed.

You had to close fast. That was what the books said, and Bezarin had dutifully read the books. If you closed fast, the enemy could not bring his air power or indirect fires to bear, and you cheapened your opponent’s long-range antitank guided missiles. You had to close fast and get in among the enemy subunits, then you needed to keep going until you were behind him, to make it impossible for him to fight you according to his desires. It sounded very straightforward on the page. But Bezarin suspected that there was a bit more to it during the actual execution.

A loud thump-thump-thump sounded off to the right. A stand of trees bowed toward the march column, bending away from lashing, half-hidden bursts of fire.

The correct response was to button up, to seal the crews within the armor of the tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. But the prescribed action was impossible for the vehicle commanders. As long as they remained on radio listening silence, signal flags and then flares were the order of the day. The vehicle commanders had to remain exposed until the final battle deployment began. Bezarin unconsciously worked down lower in his turret, bracing his shoulder against his opened hatch. A flight of jets shrieked by so low that the noise cut sharply through the padded headgear.

You couldn’t even see the damned things.

A row of birches straggled along the road. Birches even in West Germany. Anna of the birches. Bezarin felt the grime of sleeplessness on his face, lacquered over the film of tank exhaust and sweat. Not a very romantic picture, Anna. No dashing officers here out of some ball in an old novel. We are the unwashed warriors.

Up ahead, billows of smoke and dust suddenly engulfed the march column. Bezarin saw an antiaircraft piece swing its turret snappily about, its radar frantic. But the weapon did not fire. A bright burst, clearly an explosion, flared in the lead battalion’s trail company, which was separated from Bezarin’s unit by only a few tens of meters instead of the regulation number of kilometers. Everything seemed crammed, condensed in both time and space, crippled by haste and necessity.

The column did not stop moving. A minute later, Bezarin’s command tank turned off the road to move around a pair of burning infantry fighting vehicles. He could feel a distinct difference as the tank’s tracks bit into the meadowland. The driver simply followed the vehicle to his front, and Bezarin inspected the vehicles that had been hit. The troop carriers burned in patches. There was no sign of life from within them. You could not even see what hit you, Bezarin thought. The spectacle made him want to close with the enemy immediately, to pay them back.

Bezarin’s driver whipped the tank back onto the roadway. His driver had a habit of snapping the tank about, in a jaunty sort of movement that banged the occupants against the nearest inner wall. I’ll break him of that crap, Bezarin thought.

The route passed a skeletal grove that had burned black. Orange veins still glowed amid the charred waste. The site appeared to have been a tactical command post. British. As soon as Bezarin realized that what he had thought to be soot-covered logs and limbs were shriveled corpses, he fixed his eyes resolutely back upon the road.

Just past a battered village, a crowd of Soviet maintenance vehicles and personnel had taken possession of the courtyard of a relatively intact farm. Lightly damaged vehicles awaited their turn in the adjacent fields, and a tactical crane held a big tank engine suspended in midair, as if torturing it. While a few of the soldiers were diligently at work, others sat about eating breakfast. They waved at the tankers hurrying to the front. It occurred to Bezarin that perhaps they were waving at the tanks themselves, convinced they would meet again shortly. Overall, the maintenance crews appeared unconcerned with the war that was perhaps a dozen kilometers away. Sitting on their recovery vehicles or on the fenders of their repair vans, they looked the way soldiers did during a lull in an exercise.

The column came to an unannounced halt in the open, just at the edge of another village. The haze continued to thin, and the exposed nature of the position immediately began to torment Bezarin.

A scout car emerged from the village and worked its way down the line. Bezarin leaned out of the turret in curiosity. The vehicle pulled up beside the command tank.

“Major Bezarin?” a sergeant shouted over the throb of idling engines.

Bezarin nodded. “Yes.”

“You are to report to the regimental commander in the town square.”

At last, Bezarin thought. The scout car continued on its journey, searching for the next commander in the column. Bezarin ordered his driver to work their vehicle out of the line.

Bezarin navigated the tank into the little town. There appeared to be less damage here, as though it had been surrendered without contest, or as if the battle had passed it by or forgotten it. There were no civilians to be seen, though. Only soldiers in Soviet uniforms. A company-sized refueling point had been set up in the town square, just in front of the church. The vehicle density was such that Bezarin directed his tank into a side street and dismounted to search for the commander.

Bezarin stepped over the hoses with the skill of an accomplished soccer player. It struck him that these smells of fuel and exhaust were the real smells associated with a career in the tank troops. The reek of expended ordnance provided occasional perfume, but the requirement to nourish the machine and the stink of its digestion were constants. As he skirted the rear of one of his own leading tanks the uneven sound of its idle warned him that the engine was in poor shape. But there was no time to investigate under the engine compartment panels. He could only hope that the vehicle would make it into battle. Every fighting vehicle was valuable now.

Bezarin made a note of the vehicle number, intending to return to the matter if there was time. A nearby tank crewman offered him a cautious salute. Bezarin knew he had a reputation as a hard man with little patience. While his soldiers worked willingly enough for him in their way, he did not believe they liked him very much. Assignment to Bezarin’s battalion meant higher standards and harder work than did a position in any of the regiment’s other battalions. Bezarin always tried to do things correctly. He realized that there was something in the Russian spirit that sought the path of least resistance, and he revolted against the shoddy work and low standards that too often resulted from the desire to simply get by from one crisis to another. When his soldiers were scheduled for training, he made certain that they trained. When it came time to perform maintenance tasks, no matter how simple and seemingly trivial, Bezarin stayed with his men to make sure that they did not simply doze off inside their tanks.

The penalty for all of this was that Bezarin had no close friends in the regiment. The other officers regarded him with a mix of jealousy and suspicion, and it was clear that he made them nervous. He knew that the regimental commander did not like him personally. But Bezarin performed so well on training exercises, and he so raised the unit’s statistical performance, that Lieutenant Colonel Tarashvili tolerated him and allowed him to run his own battalion. Rumor had it that the regimental commander was involved in black-market activities. Whether such accusations were true or not, Bezarin had little respect for the man. He did not believe that Tarashvili really understood military matters, except for those garrison duties that kept everyone out of trouble. Bezarin did not even believe that his regimental commander cared for his profession at all.

Now they were at war, and Bezarin had waited all through the night for the least scrap of information on the situation. His respect for his commander had deteriorated still further.

Bezarin spotted a group of officers working over a map spread on the hood of a range car. As Bezarin closed on the group Tarashvili looked up and smiled.

Lieutenant Colonel Tarashvili was a dark, handsome Georgian with a rich mustache and a beautiful southern wife. He was also an excellent military politician, capable of talking circles around political officers and Party officials. Now he touched his mustache with his thumb and index finger, a habit Bezarin recognized from the tensest moments in peacetime exercises.

“Well,” Tarashvili said, still smiling, “Comrade Major Bezarin has arrived. That makes all but one.”

A few of the gathered officers muttered or gestured greetings to Bezarin. He recognized the key members of the regimental staff and the commander of the lead battalion. The regimental chief of staff was missing, however. Bezarin figured he had been sent to the rear to sort out one problem or another. Additionally, there was an air force officer present whom Bezarin did not know.

Bezarin drew out his own map and worked his way into the group. He could already see that the colored lines and arrows of axes and control measures were completely new. Bezarin hurried to copy down as much of the information as possible. Before he could finish, the last battalion commander appeared.

“Good,” Tarashvili said. “Good. Now everyone’s here. Pay attention. There’s very little time. In fact,” he said, looking uncertain, “we’re late. Not our fault, of course. The routes were not clear. The damned artillery had them tied up half the night. We should have gone in at dawn. But it doesn’t matter…”

Tarashvili continued in a rambling, confused manner, prompted now and again by his staff. Bezarin’s anger and frustration grew until he was not certain how much longer he could control himself. The situation slowly became clear. The British defense had been ruptured during the night. Some Soviet units were already fighting on the outskirts of Hannover. But in the division’s sector, the confusion within the Soviet movement control system had allowed the British to patch together one last defense on the approaches to Hildesheim. The regiment had been intended to exploit, but now, due to a late arrival, they would have to fight through the reorganized British position. Tarashvili assured everyone that the British were fought-out and that they had been thrown into hopeless confusion. But Bezarin remembered the litter of destroyed vehicles along the approach route. Tarashvili went on about a divisional feint to the north while the regiment struck the weakened British right. Bezarin quietly gave most of his attention to the map. The traces showed British defensive positions in the vicinity of a ridge between the towns of Wallersheim and Mackendorf. Most of the terrain between his current location and the enemy was open and rolling.

“Will we have a smokescreen going in?” Bezarin asked, hardly caring now if his question seemed to interrupt.

“Absolutely,” the commander of the regiment’s artillery battalion said. “In any case, the fire strikes on the British positions will be of such intensity that little will remain for the maneuver forces to engage.”

“Really, it’s very simple,” Tarashvili resumed. “A matter of drill. We’ll have the opportunity to bring the entire regiment to bear. The effect will be overwhelming.”

The plan called for the battalions to move into the attack unencumbered by unnecessary attachments. The artillery would remain under regimental control, and the air-defense subunit would also be centrally managed. Tarashvili talked the assembled officers through the attack, from pre-battle deployments to the exploitation phase. Suddenly, Bezarin had the unexpected revelation that Tarashvili was doing his sincere best. But the lieutenant colonel’s best was appalling. The plan, the coordination measures, the assumptions had the sterility and thinness of the scheme for an unimportant bit of field training. There was no imagination or even routine polish to the plan. In essence, it was nothing more than a regimental drill, with the subunits deploying at distances measured back from the estimated British positions. Bezarin realized as he listened to the staff respond to questions that no one had bothered to go forward to conduct a personal reconnaissance.

“Division stresses that no one is to stop. Just keep going, no matter what,” Tarashvili said, repeating himself as he sought a firm way to close the briefing. “The intention, remember, is to reach the line of Highway 1, then to wheel left, and to advance along it to the west. Whoever first achieves the breakthrough becomes the regiment’s forward detachment. The initial mission of the forward detachment is to open Highway 1 between Hildesheim, northwest of our present location, and the Weser hill country to the west. Upon reaching this area” — Tarashvili pointed to the map — ”the forward detachment then turns northwest for Bad Oeynhausen and the Weser River crossing site, which is the objective of the day.”

Bezarin evaluated the mission. It was a long way to Bad Oeynhausen. “The crossing site due west at Hameln is considerably closer,” he observed. “Are there any provisions for seizing it, should the situation appear favorable?”

Tarashvili looked at him in annoyance, eyes nervous. “Division has specifically identified Bad Oeynhausen as being of primary importance. We are obviously prohibited from moving on the Hameln site. Look here. You can see the control measures on the map. They’re self-explanatory.”

Bezarin, in a black mood, felt obliged to press the issue. Hameln was the obvious objective on their tactical direction. “Do you have any idea why we’re not interested in Hameln, Comrade Commander?”

Tarashvili looked at Bezarin with a semblance of fear in his eyes. Bezarin figured that the regimental commander had no answer and was embarrassed by the fact. But Tarashvili mastered himself. “Perhaps someone else has the Hameln mission. In any case, division has its reasons. Bad Oeynhausen is the objective of the forward detachment. Our air assault forces are undoubtedly already on the ground there. But we’re wasting time.”

“How much time are we allowed to inform our subunits of the mission?” Bezarin asked.

“Until the vehicles are refueled.”

That was a matter of minutes. Bezarin felt as though he needed hours to prepare his companies.

“That’s barely enough time to locate all of the company commanders.”

“There’s no time. We’re late now. We will proceed according to drill.”

“Shouldn’t we at least conduct a commander’s reconnaissance?” Bezarin asked.

“No time. We’re wasting time now. The order has been issued.”

Bezarin stared at Tarashvili.

“Go on, everyone,” Tarashvili said, forcing a smile. “Comrade Major Bezarin, you may remain and address any other questions to me.”

Bezarin felt the clock working against him. He turned to leave with the others. But Tarashvili surprised him by catching his sleeve.

The regimental commander waited until the others were out of earshot. Then he turned his dark brown eyes on Bezarin. In their depths, Bezarin thought he glimpsed the soul of a man who wanted to be anywhere else but here, perhaps at home with his splendid-looking wife.

“What do you expect?” Tarashvili asked. “What do you really expect, my friend?” The lieutenant colonel seemed painfully sincere, as if he valued Bezarin’s approval after all.

Bezarin did not know how to respond. He wanted it all to be by the book, to match his personal visions. He wanted time to issue battle instructions to his companies in a concealed jump-off position, to prepare each last detail.

“We all want to do our best,” Tarashvili continued. “I don’t know what more you can reasonably expect.”

Bezarin found himself at a loss. The words that came to mind seemed laughably formal and pompous now. Behind his back, he heard his tanks readying to move.

Tarashvili reached into the officer’s pouch he wore slung over his shoulder. Smiling, he produced two chocolate bars.

“Here,” he said. “Spoils of war. The West Germans make wonderful chocolate, you know.”

The oddity of the gift and its timing startled Bezarin. He sensed that Tarashvili, for whatever reason, was trying to give everything he had. Perhaps it was guilt over the wasted years and opportunities. But now it was evident that the regimental commander was lost and knew it.

“Take them,” Tarashvili begged. “It’s all right. You’ll be glad for them later.” The lieutenant colonel seemed almost pathetic. It struck Bezarin that he himself rarely considered other men as real human beings with complex problems of their own.

Bezarin reached out and took the chocolate bars. Trying to bribe me with chocolate. It’s the only way he knows how to do business, Bezarin thought. But he found unexpected compassion in this image of the other man now. It was pitiful that Tarashvili had come to this.

Bezarin forced out a word of thanks. So this, he thought, is what war is really like.

In the winter, Lvov seemed to be the grayest city in the world. Dirty snow piled up along the streets, making trenches of the sidewalks. When fresh snow failed to come, the snowbanks slowly blackened along the shabby rows of old imperial buildings, architectural remnants of the years when Lvov had been Lemberg, the heart of Austro-Hungarian Galicia. The once-stately offices and departments resembled women aged beyond any possible dignity as they crumbled away between the cinder-block-and-concrete structures from the Stalinist twilight. In the winter, in the crowded silence of the streetcars, it seemed as though the last feeble capacity for joy had been crushed out of the people. The men and women of Lvov trudged through the short winter days like weary soldiers, marching past closed peeling doors and frayed posters announcing events already past. He had met Anna in the winter, in Lvov, and she had stood out from her background like a match struck at midnight.

Bezarin remembered his route through the purple-gray of the faltering afternoons. He recalled the streetcars with their worn seats and their smell of urine, winter clothes, and chemicals. From the headquarters barracks, you took 23 to Konev Square, then 35 to the office block where the classrooms were located. In the old Austrian barracks, well-built and ill-heated, there was never quite enough space for all of the officers and men and activities. The streetcars, too, were overcrowded, but sometimes you got lucky coming in from the barracks and you found a seat before the benches had all filled up. Then you could read over your notes. There was insufficient room at the university, as well, and the special classes for officers were held in makeshift classrooms at an agricultural cooperative administration center. Everyone was happy with that because there was a tearoom for the cadres that still had cakes and other snacks in the late afternoon, when more public establishments had long been emptied. It became a joke among the officers that the agricultural officials, whom the officers nicknamed “our kulaks,” would never run out of food. Anna was a joke among the officers, too, but laughing about her in her absence was the only way they could cope with her.

She was an unexpected girl, this young candidate of literature. With hair that swirled around the collar of her winter coat like cognac in a proper glass. When she took charge of the class, her style had the sharpness of brandy, as well. No nonsense, Comrade Officers. Attention. The tiny Polish girl is in charge here.

The officers had come to the class for assorted reasons. The military district commander maintained very close relations with the regional and city Party officials. And he had fully committed himself to the military’s current mania for improving the educational achievements of officer cadres, as well as seeking improved contacts between the military and the community. The result was a variety of special university-sponsored courses offered in the late afternoon and evening. The older officers generally considered the courses a waste. But the younger ones, the hungry junior officers who had not had the career advantage of a tour of duty in Afghanistan, were all for the courses. The classes also meant a bit more time away from the drudgery of duties. The most popular courses were in fashionable subjects such as automation techniques. Bezarin had been one of the few to sign up for a series of writing classes. He sincerely wanted to improve his level of staff culture, but he also envisioned himself as a future contributor to the military journals, offering suggestions that would be respected and that would result in tangible changes. Most of his classmates had taken the course because it sounded like the easiest of the lot. Then the little Polish girl with the bothersomely elegant features had swept in and taken charge, and there was plenty of work for all. The officers nicknamed her “Jaruzelski’s Revenge.” And Bezarin, who had little experience with female instructors, thanks to his long years as a Suvorovets cadet, then the years at the academy and higher tank school, fell in love with his teacher.

Bezarin had always thought of himself as a firm, decisive man. But he found that he dreaded poor marks from this girl as though she were a savage commanding officer. Conscious of his short stature, he hurried to be in his seat before she arrived. At work, his mind wandered from training plans and range allocations to the way Candidate Saduska looked when she came in fresh from the street, cheeks stung red above her high collar and scarf. He did not know what to say to her. Then he discovered that she, too, had found out about the tearoom and had begun to arrive early so that she could eat her fill. Marshaling all of the courage the bloodlines of three generations of tankers and cavalrymen had given him, he waited for her one day. As she peeled back the winter layers he approached her, carrying a tray with two cups of tea and a mound of sweet rolls.

She looked at him with fierce green eyes, a revolutionary judge deciding a profiteer’s fate.

Finally, she said, “Sit down, Captain Bezarin, please. I have been meaning to talk to you.”

And the spring came early to Galicia. The muddy end-of-cycle maneuvers brought with them the first small flowers, and warm winds rolled up over the Carpathians from the golden south. None of the few girls Bezarin had known had been like this one. She gave him Chekhov to read, and he dutifully reported. The officers in the play did not seem concerned about their duties, and that was why the Imperial Russian Army had performed so poorly against the Japanese. And the three sisters never did anything but complain. They were not content with anything. Overall, he declared the play irrelevant to contemporary conditions.

“But this one,” she insisted, with the park a fresh, windy green all around her, “this story is one of the great masterpieces of Russian literature. Doesn’t it move you at all?”

He wanted to share her enthusiasm. But in these stories and plays of a bygone era, all of the men appeared indecisive, and the women were petty adulteresses.

“It’s all too artificial,” he answered at last, exasperated. “You. The two of us sitting in this park, now that’s real. Your ‘Lady with the Pet Dog’ is dead and gone.”

She laughed and told him the army had ruined him for life. He laughed, too, filled with unaccustomed fears that she might be right and that she would not go with him. Yet their love seemed to work: the hours in borrowed apartments and the dutyless Sundays in a countryside that had never seemed so rich before. Low hills that had until recently inspired him only to analyze terrain and ranging considerations gained a golden-green existence all their own, called to life by Anna’s words and gestures, and by the faint gorgeous smell of her when the wind blew down from the mountains and swept through her hair and over her shoulders. He gained confidence, only to have it desert him again. He knew that she liked his body, which was athletic, if short. She was a very small girl, with a frame that seemed far too light and frail for the spirit that enlivened it. And she liked his sobriety, and his earnestness, even when it made her laugh. But he could think of so little else that he had to offer. Officer’s quarters in some remote post in Kazakhstan, perhaps, where there was still no running water and where even a captain’s family had to share crude communal latrines.

In the end, he could not even ask. He had been the lucky one from the entire garrison, selected for attendance at the Vystrel command course, to be followed by early battalion command.

But Anna? Would she be waiting? Could she even consider waiting for him? And if he was posted to the Trans-Baikal? Or to Mongolia? Afghanistan, too, had been a possibility. Notions that once had filled him with visions of glorious achievement began to echo with time and distance, and he was quietly ashamed of himself. In the end, he left without asking her, without perhaps really knowing her at all. The new computers at the training school worked more often than had the earlier models, the tactical problems were simple for him, and there was much about which an ambitious officer could be optimistic. But his cowardice haunted him. During their last awkward hour, in a park that raced with fallen leaves, he had found he could not ask her. He resolved to write his feelings down. But later, he could not do that, either. All he could do was to think of her, wondering if she was teaching yet another group of young officers now, and if she ever thought of him, and whether any of her new students liked Chekhov.

Bezarin led his column through the cluttered rear of the combat area. The road network was superb, allowing his vehicles to move with what felt like irresistible speed and compactness. He had hastily restructured the battalion’s internal order of march so that he could personally guide the deployment of the three tank companies by visual means. The combat task of the motorized rifle company was to follow and be prepared to clear overrun positions, if necessary. The battalion’s rear services trailed, with instructions to break off the road when the battalion deployed into company columns but to remain mounted and ready to follow.

His small staff and his company commanders had worn solemn faces as Bezarin attempted to give them adequate verbal instructions. Nothing in their training had prepared them for this sudden acceleration of events. Fear showed openly on Roshchin’s face. The boyish company commander listened to Bezarin’s coaching with his mouth opened partway, revealing slightly buck teeth that made him appear hopelessly naive and immature. Dagliev, Bezarin’s most reliable company commander and a good improviser, looked ten years older from lack of sleep. The last tank company commander, Voronich, stood slouched, grumpy, as though his shoulders and spine were declaring, “This is pig shit, and we all know it.” Voronich was cynical to the point of being theatrical, but he was competent at his job. Lasky, who commanded the motorized rifle troops, looked like an orphan boy. Bezarin knew that the motorized rifle officer expected to receive the dirtiest tasks and the least thanks. But there was no time for coddling now. Bezarin did his best to answer their worried questions, even as his officers tried to phrase their queries in words that sounded as tough and masculine as possible. It occurred to Bezarin that they were a distinctly unheroic-looking group, huddling around the spread map in their filthy coveralls. The faces had a slightly lunatic appearance, broken skin smeared black and framed by hair skewed wildly in pulling their headgear on and off. Bezarin did not give them all of the details that would come into play should they become the designated forward detachment. He felt his officers had enough to work through in the little time available. But he was determined to be the commander who punched through.

Now, speeding along the road from village to village, Bezarin felt as though nothing could stop him. Intellectually, he realized that there was great danger, especially from enemy aircraft, since the heavy air-defense weaponry remained under centralized control. The battalion had to rely on a few shoulder-fired missiles, which, in turn, required soldiers — boys — to calmly expose their bodies under combat conditions. The army gave them a few weeks training and, sometimes, an armored vest to shield their torsos. Some of the newer soldiers had never even fired a live missile. But there was nothing to be done. And emotionally, he was already in the attack.

The column passed battery after battery of guns and howitzers, their tubes raised as if in salute from the midst of broken orchards or under hurriedly erected camouflage nets in open fields. Closer to the direct-fire battle, readily identifiable artillery reconnaissance groups marked off and surveyed still more firing positions. The road passed a medical clearing station where wounded soldiers lay in rows upon the ground. Communications vans filled a sports field at the edge of a shot-up village, and uncollected corpses littered the village streets. A lost-looking young soldier stood beside a broken-down truck, watching Bezarin’s tanks race by.

Suddenly, the artillery preparation began. The volume of fire from the massed artillery created a disturbance in the air that was so palpable Bezarin could feel it in his stomach. The effort felt solidly reassuring. It was difficult to believe that anything could survive such a barrage. The country had opened out into dry, rolling terrain, and the impact of the artillery was partially visible along a sweeping ridge running north and south several kilometers in the distance, astride Bezarin’s line of advance. Smoke began to rise, as though storm clouds had settled on the earth.

Bezarin knew that the lead battalion was already in its start position, waiting for him to come up on the left. The roadway traced over a small bridge. Bezarin checked his map, then looked off to the right. A shattered motorized rifle company appeared to be regrouping, and Bezarin went cold. But a moment later, he saw the company columns of his sister battalion drawn up in a grassy valley beyond the tattered subunit. Everything appeared intact and ready. The lone motorized rifle company was probably getting ready to displace after being relieved of local responsibility.

Bezarin hurriedly unrolled his signal flags and stood erect in the turret. He stretched out his arms, directing prebattle formation, company columns abreast. Then he ordered his driver to slow down so that the trail companies could come up after crossing the bridge. In the middle distance, the wall of smoke looked dense enough to gather in your arms. Bezarin led the center company off the road, watching Dagliev hurry to catch up on the left. Dagliev’s company briefly disappeared in a depression, then reappeared exactly where it was meant to be. Bezarin looked right.

Roshchin was on the right, on his own now. But Bezarin felt it was the best position for the boy. He would have an entire battalion on his right flank, and the bulk of his own battalion on his left. All that Roshchin had to do was execute his company drill and keep up. At least for now, Roshchin appeared to be in control. Minor obstructions staggered the progress of his company slightly, but the frontage would be approximately correct. And beyond Roshchin’s line of armor, Bezarin could see First Battalion breaking out of a line of trees and hedges from a parallel route.

Bezarin tried to gauge the distance to the wall of smoke, then he rose again and signaled platoon columns. He ordered his driver to slow, allowing the tanks of Voronich’s company to overtake them. On the right flank, First Battalion surged visibly ahead, almost ready to assault the line of smoke. Bezarin signaled an increase in speed, hoping the company commanders were paying attention.

The local roughness of the terrain tossed Bezarin against the rim of the hatch, and he steadied himself as best he could. The smoke and artillery fire were still a kilometer out but already felt too close. Bezarin dropped the signal flags into the belly of the tank. The next command would be given over the radio.

As his tank crested the low ridge Bezarin saw that First Battalion had begun to pull hard to the right. He started cursing at the developing split in the assault formation, but then he saw the cause of the problem. A wind gap was opening in the smokescreen, exposing the center of the line of attack. The artillery had stopped firing smoke rounds too early. Bezarin looked to the rear, struggling for elevation, searching for any sign of an artillery observation post. The attrition within the division’s artillery establishment had been so great that Bezarin had not even received an artillery officer to direct fires in support of the battalion, but Tarashvili had promised that regiment would handle the requirement. Now the only vehicles Bezarin could see to his rear were the meandering trucks of the battalion’s rear services, hunting for a place to tuck in for the duration of the attack. Visibility to the rear was splendid. But there was nothing to see.

The textbook response called for Bezarin to guide his battalion to the right, to maintain contact with First Battalion at all costs. He nuzzled the microphone closer to his lips. But he could not order Roshchin into the gap. Whoever drove up between the parting curtains of smoke would be sacrificed. And, as his company commanders began to bring their tanks on line, Bezarin could not see the ultimate sense of throwing away a company, perhaps more, to briefly maintain contact that would inevitably be lost in the smokescreen. He felt his battalion surging with a life of its own, a long wave of steel moving at combat speed toward the towering gray wall of smoke. He waited for the first report of the guns.

Bezarin glanced left to check on Dagliev. And he noticed an aspect of the terrain that his hasty map reconnaissance had not fully brought home to him. The ridgelines on which the smoke had settled threw a long spur out to the southeast. It was obvious now, on the scene, that the finger of high ground would shield any attempted British counterattack until it reached the rear of the attacking Soviet units. All the British would need to do would be to allow the Soviets to move past the spur into the trap. On the other hand, it offered Bezarin an opportunity to take the British in the rear, if they had failed to cover their extreme flank.

Bezarin decided to take a chance.

As he spoke his first words into the microphone British artillery fire began to crash down just behind his formation.

The British knew.

“Volga One, Two, Three, this is Lodoga Five. Amendment to combat instructions. Three, move left six hundred meters. Get on the reverse slope of that spur. Use the smoke. Follow it in behind the British positions.” Bezarin paused. The artillery had not yet adjusted to hit them, and Bezarin realized that the smoke was of some value after all. The British were guessing, executing preplanned fires. Then he found he could not remember the call sign for the motorized rifle troops. Exasperated, he called, “Lasky… Lasky, you follow Three. Stay close to him. Three, you get on their damned flank and roll them up. Call me if you have trouble. Acknowledge.”

“Ladoga, this is Three. We’re losing contact with First Battalion.”

“Damn it, I know that. Just get up on that ridge and kill everything you see. Meet me on the far slope. Do you understand?”

“This is Three. Executing now.”

“Volga One, Two… let’s get them. Into the smoke. Independent fires on contact.”

“One, acknowledged.”

“Two, acknowledged.” That was Roshchin. Bezarin could hear the nervousness in the boy’s voice.

“Ladoga, your hatch is flapping.”

Bezarin reached out, trying to snag his hatch cover. The jouncing of the vehicle as it moved cross-country made it difficult. A hatch could crush your hand or break an arm. Finally, he caught the big steel disk and smashed it down, fastening it.

Bezarin felt as though he had suddenly gone underwater in the sealed belly of the tank. He always felt cut off from the real world when the vehicle was fully sealed. He leaned his forehead against the cowl of his optics. But the smoke began to shroud his vision.

The tank jolted hard. It seemed to lift to the side. Then it stopped. The shock smashed Bezarin’s brow hard against his periscope. He began to curse his driver, just as the tank resumed movement.

The smoke grew patchier. Bezarin’s ears rang, and he did not know why.

More speed, Bezarin thought. Every nerve in his body seemed to want to move faster. Yet he knew that he could not afford to pull the line apart any worse than the movement to contact in the smoke would do by itself. He resisted the temptation to order an all-out charge. He feared that, in the smoke, they would soon begin killing one another if they became disordered.

“Target, right, one thousand,” the gunner called.

Bezarin looked right. A tank in profile, firing toward First Battalion, clearly visible in a corridor between waves of smoke. Bezarin had missed it.

“Load sabot.”

The automatic loader whirled into action.

“Sabot up.”

“Fire,” Bezarin ordered.

The tank rocked back. The breech jettisoned its casing, and the reek of high explosives filled the crew compartment.

The round missed.

“Load sabot,” Bezarin shouted, forcing himself to go through the precise verbal and physical motions.

The regimental net scratched like an old phonograph record. “This is Ural Five. I’m in trouble. Ambush. Ambush. They’re all around me.”

First Battalion was in trouble. Bezarin half listened for a response from regiment. But none came. Bezarin realized there was nothing he could do for his sister battalion now except to fight his own fight as well as he possibly could. But it troubled him that there was no reply whatsoever from Tarashvili or one of his staff officers.

“Range, seven-fifty.” Bezarin focused with all of his strength. The British tank sat perfectly on the aiming point. As he watched it began to swing its turret around.

“Fire.”

A splash of flame lit the British tank. The turret stopped turning.

“This is Two. Ladoga, this is Two. I’ve lost two tanks.”

Roshchin. He sounded near panic.

“Keep moving, Two. Just keep moving. Fight back. You’re all right.” But Bezarin suspected that the boy was not all right.

“This is Ural Five, calling any station. I need help.”

“Ural, this is Ladoga. I hear you. But I’m in a fight myself.”

“Ladoga, can you reach regiment? They’re ripping me apart.”

“I’ll try. But I haven’t heard a thing.” Bezarin cleared his throat, rasping at the fumes inside the tank. He attempted to raise a regimental station. But there was no response.

“Target, six hundred,” Bezarin shouted to the gunner as another enemy tank appeared. It was nerve-wracking to play this deadly game of hide-and-seek between the billows and eddies of smoke. “On the right.”

“God, oh, God. They’re killing us all” It was Roshchin. Bezarin knew beyond any doubt that the boy had lost control now.

“Roshchin,” he called. “Get a grip on yourself. Fight, you son of a whore, or they will kill you.” Bezarin remembered the loneliness and self-doubt of the boy in the early morning hours. But he could not pity him now; he felt only anger. Roshchin had a job to do, and all of their lives depended on it.

“Five hundred… fire… selecting… sabot up… adjust to four-fifty… fire …”

Bezarin’s tank suddenly emerged from the smoke into the painful clarity of daylight. In his optics, he could see three British tanks and four of his own in a murderous shoot-out at minimal ranges. As he watched, the tanks destroyed each other in suicidal combat.

“Smoke grenades away,” Bezarin screamed, fumbling at his controls. “Target…”

“Got the bastard.”

“Three, can you hear me?” Bezarin called, his desperation rising.

Nothing.

“Where are you, Three?”

Instead of Dagliev, Roshchin came back on, pleading for help. Bezarin coldly ordered him off the net. An enemy tank appeared in Bezarin’s optics, so close it seemed as though they were bound to collide with it.

“Target left. Get on him,” Bezarin yelled to his gunner.

“Too close.”

“Fire. “Bezarin’s field of vision filled up with blast effects. But they had gotten the British tank first. Bezarin felt weak, almost nauseous, yet his pulse throbbed as though his heart would explode.

“Volga One, this is Ladoga… is that your element mixed up with the British on the crest?”

“This is One. I’m still in the smoke. It must be Two up there.”

At the mention of his call sign, Roshchin came back up on the net. He was weeping. “They’re all gone,” he said, “everybody’s gone.”

Bezarin’s gunner screamed. A British tank had its gun tube aimed directly at them.

“Point blank, “Bezarin yelled. “Fire.” He did not even know what kind of round, if any, was in the breech.

A burst of sparks dazzled off the mantlet of the British tank’s gun. A moment later, the enemy vehicle began to pull off of its position without firing. Bezarin sensed a kill and methodically directed his gunner. The next round stopped the British tank, and smoke began to climb from its deck. Roshchin cried into the battalion net as though he had lost his sanity. Bezarin found himself cursing the boy, even wishing that the British would kill him, just to stop him from blabbering. He feared that Roshchin’s panic would become contagious.

“Roshchin,” Bezarin said, disregarding the last radio discipline. “Roshchin, take command of yourself. You’re still alive. You can fight back. You’re all right.”

Bezarin could not even be certain that his transmission had reached the boy, who had begun to broadcast incessantly.

Suddenly, Bezarin lost his temper. “Roshchin, if you don’t get off that radio, I’ll shoot you myself. Do you understand me, you cowardly piece of shit?”

For the moment, Roshchin dropped from the net. Bezarin’s driver barely avoided colliding with another Soviet tank in a last pocket of smoke. The driver halted the tank to let the other vehicle pass. Bezarin used the pause to help the gunner replenish the automatic loader’s ready rack.

Roshchin called again. This time his voice was marginally more rational. “They’re behind us,” he cried. “I have enemy tanks to my rear.”

“We’re behind them, you stupid fuck,” Bezarin called back. “Just shoot.”

Kikerin, the driver, set the tank back in motion, throwing Bezarin off balance. As soon as he recovered, he tried to piece his unit back together over the radio.

“One, where the hell are you?”

“Can’t talk,” Voronich answered. He sounded out of breath. “We’re fighting it out with an entire company. I think they lost their way in the smoke.”

All right. At least Voronich was fighting. “Volga Three, this is Ladoga Five.” No answer. Bezarin wondered if he had squandered an entire company, and his best company, at that, by sending them around the spur. He ordered his driver to head for a copse of trees that sat slightly higher than the tank’s present location. As the vehicle moved Bezarin watched the treeline warily.

A British armored personnel carrier bolted from the grove like a flushed rabbit. Kikerin knew enough to stop the tank, and the gunner already had the target in his sights.

“Fire.”

The British troop carrier exploded in a spectacular bloom of flame.

“Get in against the trees and halt,” Bezarin ordered. He had lost control of his battalion in the smoke and the fighting. But he did not see how he could have done otherwise. Now he could only hope and gather what remained of his battalion to him. He did not even know for certain who was winning. If the radio net was to be believed, the fight had been a disaster. Yet here he was, on the high ground atop the broad ridge, with a trail of destroyed British vehicles to his rear. It was hard to make sense of it. At any rate, there was a perceptible change in the level of combat in the immediate area. A pocket of quiet seemed to have grown up around his tank.

He tried again to contact Dagliev, hoping that his position on the high ground would make a difference.

“Volga Three, this is Ladoga Five. What is your situation?”

Dagliev replied as promptly and as clearly as if he had never been away. “This is Three. I’m behind them. Clean. Killing them one after another as they pull off. It’s just like firing on the range.”

“Your losses?”

“None. They never saw us coming. They must’ve been totally fixed on the smoke and what was going on in front of them. We ran right through their artillery batteries.”

“Good. Wonderful. When you’re done at your current location, I want you to sweep back to the east toward me. Close the trap completely. I’m up on the high ground. Just watch what you’re shooting at as you close.”

So perhaps things were not so bad after all. Bezarin felt a tremendous satisfaction in having sent Dagliev around the enemy’s flank.

“Volga One, this is Ladoga Five. Situation?”

“Wait. Load sabot. I’m still in the shit, but it looks about even.”

“Are you all right?” Bezarin was surprised at his good luck, after all.

“Yes. All right. But Roshchin’s gone. Now. Fire. I saw his tank go up. Catastrophic kill. I watched the last of his company go. In seconds. They came out of the smoke at an angle, driving right up between my tanks and the British. It was a matter of seconds.”

So. Perhaps, Bezarin thought, wishes had a dark, unforgiving power. But he could not let himself think about that now.

“All right,” Bezarin called. “Just stay off the crest of the ridge. Three’s coming in behind them now.”

“I heard the transmission.”

“Good luck.” Bezarin switched over to the regimental net.

“Ural Five, this is Ladoga Five.”

Silence. Then a bit of faint, eerie music.

“Kuban Five, this is Ladoga Five.”

“Target, left,” Bezarin’s gunner screamed.

“Hold it, that’s one of ours,” Bezarin said. He tried the microphone again.

“Kuban Five, this is Ladoga Five.”

No response. Where was everybody?

Bezarin angrily unlatched his hatch cover and shoved it up hard. Unreasonably, he felt that if he were out in the open air, he would have a better chance of reaching someone.

“Comrade Commander,” the gunner called, trying to stop him.

Bezarin ignored the tug on his overalls. The air, laden with the acrid residue of the artillery barrage, of the smoke and the tank fight, was nonetheless marvelously fresh after the poisonous fumes in the interior of the tank. The noise of battle was still there, but at a reduced volume. Then Bezarin noticed the huge black scar on the side of the turret. There was a break in the reactive armor plating that gave the appearance of a section of mouth where teeth had been knocked out. Bezarin suddenly remembered the tremendous jolt that had shaken the tank early in the fight. It made him feel weak in the bottom of his belly to realize how close he had come to dying.

Bezarin was startled a second time by the appearance of Voronich’s tank leading five others up the hillside behind him. Several of these tanks also bore visible scars where the reactive armor had saved them.

Shaking his head, Bezarin pressed the microphone closer to his lips. “Volga One, this is Ladoga Five. Put your tanks in the woodline just below my position. Cover the saddle you just worked up and the crest to the north.” Six tanks, Bezarin thought, plus his own. Seven. And Dagliev had reported no losses at the time of his last transmission.

Roshchin was gone. And it sounded like the greater part of his company had gone with him. But Bezarin hoped that a few of them, at least, would show up alive and well as the last smoke dissipated.

Bezarin called Dagliev. “Three, what’s your current position?”

At first, there was no response. Bezarin was just about to try a second call when Dagliev responded.

“This is Three. I can’t talk now. I’m in it hot.”

Bezarin’s newfound confidence began to dissolve.

“Three, where are you? I’ve got seven tanks up here. I’ll come to you.”

“It’s all right,” Dagliev answered. He sounded annoyed at the suggestion that he needed help. “We’re just shooting as fast as we can. We caught their reserve right in its ass end.”

“One, this is Ladoga. Prepare to move.”

“Acknowledged.”

Bezarin knew that they had the British now. He wanted to finish the job. But he was worried at the complete silence on the regimental net.

“Ural, Kuban, this is Ladoga. Can you hear me?”

“Ladoga, this is Beechtree. I hear you clearly.”

Bezarin had no idea who Beechtree was. He tried again.

“Ural, Kuban, this is Ladoga. What is your situation?”

“This is Beechtree,” the unidentified station insisted. “Regimental artillery. The attack has failed; it’s all over. Air and fire strikes hit Kuban as he was moving up. Ural never reached the British positions. All of the battalions are destroyed. It’s all over.”

“Like hell,” Bezarin said. “We’re in behind them. They’ve pulled off the southern portion of the ridge. We have their positions. Now we’re going to roll them up from south to north. Can you support us?”

The net was silent. Then:

“Ladoga, this is Nevsky Ten. Do you hear my transmission?”

The transmitter was clearly very powerful. Whoever Nevsky Ten was, his voice dominated the static and distant stations on the net.

“I hear your transmission,” Bezarin said.

“Execute your decision,” the godlike voice commanded. “We will support you. Antitank helicopters are closing from the north at this time. You roll up the British from the south. Be prepared to mark your positions with flares. I will stay on this net. If you have any problems, call me immediately. Stop. Beechtree, answer your vertical net. But priority of fires is to Ladoga, is that clear?”

Bezarin no longer had any doubt about the identity of Nevsky Ten. It was Major General Duzov, the division commander.

The British were in a trap. Bezarin turned his tanks northward behind the last line of enemy positions as smoothly as in a demonstration for visiting dignitaries, working up along a broken plateau atop the high ground. He felt as though he was absolutely in control. Most of the targets were infantry fighting vehicles and transporters now, with few tanks in evidence. Bezarin concluded that the British had run out of antitank ammunition, since they so often failed to return fire effectively. Their surprised vehicles scurried about like mice surrounded by cats. As Bezarin’s armor overran one of the positions a British soldier emptied his rifle at the command tank, then charged the forty-ton vehicle, swinging his empty weapon as a club. Bezarin cut the man in half with machine-gun fire.

The last of the smoke disappeared, and Bezarin’s tankers fought under blue skies. The Soviet tanks halted along the cleared ridge, pursuing the fleeing enemy with their fires. The long slope up which Bezarin’s sister battalion had attacked presented a chilling testament as to what could happen when a hasty attack became so rushed that it degenerated into recklessness. Most of the battalion’s vehicles sat inertly or burned, sending pillars of dark smoke heavenward. The encounter had been devastating for both sides, overall. The British had killed, and then they had been killed. The combination of Bezarin’s sweep and the converging attack helicopters had turned the tide. Bezarin switched his attention to rallying what remained of his battalion and the survivors of First Battalion’s debacle.

Stray vehicles gathered around Bezarin’s position. Leaderless, the disoriented crews’ general confusion was evident in their tendency to draw too close to one another, as if for protection by virtue of proximity, and in the slackness of their behavior. Vehicles simply halted in the open in the middle of the seized positions, their crews convinced that the work had been done and that they could relax. The tautness of battle ebbed dangerously now.

Bezarin acted quickly. He had not forgotten the forward detachment mission, and he did not want to be deprived of the opportunity to lead his tanks into the enemy’s rear ahead of everyone else. He ordered Dagliev to take one platoon of motorized riflemen along with his tanks and push on northwest toward Hildesheim, clearing the road. Then he organized every stray tank he could locate that remained in running order into a heavy company under Voronich, his remaining company commander. His rear-services officer provided a pleasant surprise by appearing on the scene before the last tanks had stopped firing. The rear-services captain, an especially preachy communist who was laughably naive about much of the corruption in the regiment’s rear services, had come through, living up to all of the hollow-sounding phrases about the need for good communists to take the initiative. A representative from Beechtree, the regimental artillery commander, came up as well, maneuvering warily in his artillery command and reconnaissance vehicle. It was a captain, a battery commander. His guns were ready to move out and follow Bezarin. Evidently, the division commander’s directives to Beechtree had shocked him into action.

Bezarin delayed calling Nevsky Ten until he felt he had assembled a sufficient, if lean, grouping that could act as a forward detachment. He personally dashed among the congregating vehicles, insuring that they moved to the correct radio frequencies and ordering them into local positions that provided at least partial protection from ground and aerial observation. The clear sky showed webs of jet trails, and Bezarin felt it was only a matter of time before the enemy would attempt to strike back. The best of his tankers had quickly learned new priorities now, and they hurried to restock their on-board units of fire from the limited quantities brought forward on the battalion’s trucks. Bezarin urged them to hurry, convinced that time was pressing, that the afternoon was waning. When he finally glanced at his watch, he was amazed to find that it was not yet ten in the morning.

As Bezarin remounted his own tank the gunner told him that Nevsky Ten had been calling.

Bezarin was horrified. “Why didn’t you come and get me?”

The gunner shrugged. He was a gunner. Command communications were not part of his responsibilities.

Bezarin hastily pulled on his headpiece. “Nevsky Ten, this is Ladoga Five.”

Major General Duzov responded quickly. “This is Nevsky Ten. What’s your situation?”

“We’ve cleared the ridge. I’ve formed a grouping by combining my battalion with the remnants of First Battalion. Overall strength, battalion-minus of tanks, with one motorized rifle company attached and a battery of guns moving to join us. We are prepared to act as a forward detachment. I’ve already dispatched a reinforced tank company to clear the approach route in the Hildesheim tactical direction.”

Bezarin’s body tensed in anticipation. He wanted this mission. He wanted to lead. He had tasted blood, and he liked it. He felt as though he could take on anything the British had to offer. His battalion had earned the right to be the first to reach the Weser River.

“This is Nevsky Ten. Do you have a clear understanding of the mission? Do not respond with details in the clear. Just yes or no.”

“Yes. I understand. We’re ready.” Bezarin knew this was a slight exaggeration. It would be at least ten to fifteen minutes before he could get everyone back aboard their vehicles and organized into march order.

“All right. Do you have any long-range means of communications with you?”

Bezarin thought hard. What he needed was a regimental command tank or vehicle.

“This is Ladoga Five. I have a special artillery vehicle with me. I can use the artillery long-range set, if necessary.”

“Good. Get your vehicles on the road. And whatever you do, keep moving. We will all be behind you.”

The gravity in the commander’s voice, and his simple choice of words, moved Bezarin. He switched over to his battalion radio net, anxious to send out the words that would set them all in motion. He knew that his tanks needed more time to resupply, that the stray vehicles had not been sufficiently integrated into the grouping to do much beyond merely following the vehicle to their immediate front. But he knew that now, with a great hole punched through the last line of the enemy’s defense, time was the dominant factor. He felt simultaneously elated and half-wild with small, cloying frustrations. He worked his radio in a fierce, uncompromising voice that had matured in the space of a morning. Major Bezarin wanted to move.