Red Army

Nineteen

The radio reports from his forward element had not begun to prepare Bezarin for the scene in the valley below him. He had painfully worked what was left of his battalion — now designated as a forward detachment — through the confusing network of roads southwest of Hildesheim. There had been fighting down in the small city, where another forward element on a converging axis had been engaged, and funnels of black smoke rose high into the blue sky. Bezarin labored to keep clear of the action in Hildesheim, following the path blazed by Dagliev and his reconnaissance and security element. The mission was to reach the Weser at Bad Oeynhausen — not to get bogged down in local actions unless it proved absolutely unavoidable.

Dagliev had reported back to Bezarin about the backed-up traffic along the east-west artery of Highway 1, which was the main line of communication Bezarin hoped to exploit. The company commander became emotional over the radio, searching for adjectives, describing the scene up ahead in apocalyptic terms. But Bezarin had only his mission in mind. He ordered Dagliev to stop acting like a nervous little virgin and get moving.

As Bezarin’s tank broke over the ridge the view forced him to halt his march column. Dagliev had not been succumbing to emotionalism. Stretching across the landscape, civilian vehicles packed the vital highway, all struggling to move west. There was so little vehicular motion in the jammed-up lanes that, at first glance, the column appeared to be at a complete standstill. But once the eye began to seek out details, slow nudging movements became apparent, really more nervousness than actual progress. Along what had once been an eastbound lane, a column of military supply vehicles smoldered where they had been caught in the open by Soviet air power. Here and there, clusters of wrecked or burned civilian automobiles and small trucks further thickened the consistency of the traffic flow. Some vehicles had evidently been abandoned by panic-stricken occupants, and on both sides of the road, a straggling line of civilians with suitcases, packs, and bundles trudged along. Bezarin judged that this was the last wave fleeing southwest from the major urban center of Hannover and its satellite towns, trying to get across the Weser to an imagined safety less than fifty kilometers away. It was a pathetic scene, but Bezarin forcibly reined in his sympathies. The enemy would have put the Russian people in the same condition, if not in a worse one, had they been allowed to strike first. He doubted that a West German or an American tank battalion commander would have wasted as much thought on the situation as he had already squandered. He pictured his NATO counterparts as fascist-leaning mercenaries, fighting for money, unbothered by human cares.

Bezarin gave the order to move out, deploying cautiously into combat formation to facilitate a safe crossing of the high fields that tapered down to the highway. He still had no heavy air-defense protection, and he worried about getting caught in the open. He ordered the self-propelled howitzer battery to remain on the ridge, covering the movement of the tanks and infantry combat vehicles. His spirits had fallen off sharply. He had imagined that, once in the enemy’s rear, the roads would be clear. Now he had to work around this exodus. He could not see how he would be able to make adequate time.

But remaining static would not solve anything. Bezarin figured that, at a minimum, he could stay close to the refugee column, exploiting them as passive air defense. The enemy would have to strike his own people to hit Bezarin’s tanks. Bezarin was far from certain that the NATO officers would show any compunction about such an action, but it offered a better chance than driving openly through fields all day long. Bezarin wondered if the West Germans had perhaps even planned this, using their own people as a shield to block the progress of the Soviet Army on the roads. Well, he would make the most of this situation, too.

He found himself thinking of Anna. She did not fit in here, but her image was insistent. She scolded him, flashing her high Polish temper, demanding that he see the mass of frightened humanity down on the road as a crowd of terrified individuals, seeking nothing more than safety.

All the same, the refugees were an annoyance. Bezarin felt like a cavalryman with new spurs since the engagement along the ridgeline with the British, and he wanted to drive his steel horse faster and faster, to water it on the banks of the Weser.

His tattered battalion unfolded from the high road and the crown of trees, opening into a quick, if somewhat ragged, battle formation. The self-propelled guns sidled off to firing positions as the wave of tanks, followed by infantry fighting vehicles, plowed toward the valley floor. The warriors who had survived the morning’s engagement had a changed feel to them now. Bezarin could sense it even through the steel walls of the tanks. It was, he suspected, the feel of men who had tasted the blood of their enemies.

Tanks sprayed dirt and mud in their trails as they maneuvered across the declining slope. Turrets wheeled to challenge the flanks. Bezarin saw only the readiness, the will to combat, ignoring the unevenness of the line. He knew that his demanding approach to training, despite the resentment it caused, had paid off. He felt that he could match his tankers against any in the world.

Along the highway, still nearly a kilometer distant, the refugees on foot began to run at the sight of the skirmish line of tanks. First a few of them ran, then other runners gathered around the first clusters like swarming insects. Some fell. Others discarded their last possessions.

At first, this response surprised Bezarin. It had never occurred to him that this slow river of humanity should be afraid at the sight of his tanks. The idea of causing them any intentional injury had never crossed his mind. In a moment’s revelation, he saw the world through the fear-widened eyes of the refugees. Despite the seal of his headset over his ears, he imagined that he could plainly hear their screams.

Bezarin was about to redirect his formation toward a secondary road heading off to the west, refusing his right flank, when the first muzzle blast flashed from across the valley.

Beyond the stream of fleeing civilians, an enemy force of undetermined size either had been waiting in ambush or had just reached the wooded ridge on the opposite side of the valley. Other muzzle blasts flared in quick succession, and Bezarin’s tanks maneuvered to take advantage of the sparse local cover. They had been caught fully exposed on the slope.

On his right, Bezarin saw one of his tanks erupt, its turret lifting like the top of a mountain raised by the force of a volcano. Some of his platoons had begun to fire back, but the enemy was at extreme range, and the tanks had to fire from the halt to have any hope of hitting their targets.

Another of his tanks began to burn.

Good gunners, Bezarin thought. The bastards.

His first instinct was to pull everyone back up into the treeline. His ridge was considerably more commanding than the one occupied by the enemy.

“Attention,” Bezarin called into the radio mouthpiece. “Do not return fire unless you have positively identified a target. Voronich,” he called, dispensing with call signs, “your task is to identify targets for volley fire. The artillery is to suppress the enemy position along the treeline. Neshutin, you — ”

Bezarin froze. The enemy were coming out. It was senseless. They had good concealed firing positions. They were willingly putting themselves at the same disadvantage Bezarin’s vehicles were in.

Then he got it. They were trying to rescue, to cover, the refugee column. Again, Bezarin was startled by the enemy’s apparent perception of the threat his tanks posed. But he did not waste time on moral philosophy. The enemy had just told him, frankly, where their values lay.

“Everybody,” Bezarin called over the radio net. “All tanks and fighting vehicles. Move forward now. Full combat speed. Get in among the refugee traffic. Use the automobiles for cover. Fire smoke grenades and move now. All tanks back on line. Now.”

His vehicle lurched forward at his command. Bezarin triggered the reloaded smoke grenade canisters and drove headlong into the rising puffs. His vehicle jounced wildly over the uneven field.

The smoke made him cough. But he did not want to seal himself in the belly of the tank. He was afraid he would lose control of this engagement, as he had lost control in the morning’s fighting.

Beyond the thin screen of smoke, the column of automobiles soon blocked the enemy’s fields of fire. Bezarin looked quickly to the right and left, unsure how many tanks should be there now, but satisfied with the grouping he saw. Quick armored infantry fighting vehicles nosed their sharp prows in among the tanks, losing drill formation in the headlong dash for the highway.

Bezarin’s tank roared through an area of low ground from which the column of automobiles on the built-up road actually stood higher than his turret. Then the tank slanted back upward, heading for the multicolored column of civilian vehicles.

The last drivers deserted their automobiles, leaving doors wide open in their haste. Bezarin’s tank shot up over the berm of the road and slammed down on the pavement of the highway. His driver only halted the tank after its glacis had crunched into the side of a big white sedan.

The meadow beyond the road had filled with running figures, their bright clothing like confetti thrown over the green fields. The refugees scrambled toward their own forces. But now the tables had turned. The enemy tanks had lost the race to the road, and they stood embarrassed in the open fields, uncertain sentinels attempting to cover the human flood. Bezarin could see that the enemy unit was weaker than his own after all, its vehicles scarred by combat and spread thinly across the long slope.

“Get them,” Bezarin screamed into the mike, “get them while they’re in the open. Don’t let them get away. Platoon commanders, direct fire.” He felt himself bursting with adrenaline; his determination to destroy his enemies was so powerful he felt it could propel him into the sky. He had not paused to consider his choice of words as he issued his command.

“Target,” Bezarin said, dropping into position behind his optics. “Range, six hundred meters.”

“Six hundred meters.”

“Correct to six-fifty. Selecting sabot.”

“Six-fifty. Sabot loaded.”

“Fire.”

Bezarin’s tank rocked back, and an instant later an enemy tank jerked to a stop, lifting slightly, like a man punched hard in the lower belly. The enemy tank failed to explode, but smoke began to fluster from its vents.

Bezarin was in a killing mood.

“Repeat target,” he said. “Six-fifty.”

“Target fixed.”

“Sabot.”

“Ready.”

“Fire.”

Bezarin’s tank rocked again and, before it settled, the enemy tank dazzled with sparks. A moment later its deck blew skyward. Magazine strike, Bezarin thought. And he scanned the fields for another target.

His optics found a changed scene. Most of the civilians had dropped into the high grass, caught in the middle of the battle. Then Bezarin saw one running group jerk into contorted positions and fall. Someone had intentionally gunned them down.

“Comrade Commander, target.”

Bezarin saw the tank. Lumbering down, as if to rescue the survivors, its long gun fired above the bodies prostrate in the grass. It looked like a defiant, protective lioness. Bezarin understood, even sympathized with the commander of the enemy vehicle. The maneuver was brave, and suicidal. Bezarin fixed the target in his rangefinder.

The headset had grown chaotic with a litany of calls. Bezarin tuned them out until he had fired on the lone, brave enemy tank. Two other tanks also fired on it in quick succession, and they managed a catastrophic kill. The enemy vehicle burned its wounded crew alive.

The surviving enemy vehicles had pulled back into the distant treeline, and Bezarin’s supporting battery pounded their positions, forcing them back yet again. The firing of tank guns subsided very quickly. It had been a swift engagement, determined by the single factor of Bezarin’s tanks beating the enemy to the highway by less than a minute. Bezarin searched the horizon for any last targets. But all of the visible enemy vehicles remained stationary, either blazing or smoking heavenward. Bezarin watched as a lone civilian rose and ran up the hillside, only to be tossed about by a burst of automatic-weapons fire. Bezarin watched as though the action were occurring on a movie screen. Then he snapped back to his senses.

“Cease fire, cease fire,” he shouted into the mike. “I will personally shoot the next man who fires on a civilian.”

He opened his turret, climbing up into open air only to be greeted by choking black smoke. At first, he thought his tank was on fire, that it had been hit and that they had not even realized it. Then he located the true source of the smoke. A burning automobile stood just to one side of the tank. The heat seared Bezarin’s cheeks. His vehicle, already battered, wore a cloak of black soot down the side.

The continuing volume of small-arms fire alarmed Bezarin. There was nothing left to shoot at. And there were too many shouts, screams.

He dropped back into the turret, ordering his driver to back up out of the grasp of the fire and smoke. Then he called his subordinates and ordered them to get their men under control, to halt all firing immediately. In a rage, he stripped off his headset and drew his personal weapon. He climbed out of the turret and jumped down from the tank, trotting through the smoke in the direction of the greatest density of noise.

Countless automobiles had taken fire, or had been wrecked in their last desperate attempts at flight. Between the drifting curtains of smoke, islands of clarity revealed dead and badly wounded drivers and passengers, slumped over steering wheels or spilling from opened doors. Dead civilians lay scattered about the roadway, some of them crushed. A heavily built middle-aged woman’s flowered skirt lofted on the wind, dropping high up on the back of her sprawled legs.

Beyond the next drape of smoke, Bezarin surprised a group of motorized rifle troops with a girl. They had stripped off her skirt and underpants, leaving her clad only in a sweater, and they were teasing her, driving her screaming from one man to another. The girl wailed in mortal terror, and his men laughed. Whether or not she could ever be pretty, her fear had wrought her young face into a mask of revolting ugliness. Her eyes were those of an animal beaten almost to death, but with just enough spark of life remaining to want desperately to live.

The girl shrieked in a foreign language, and one of the soldiers grabbed her sweater, tearing it as she tried to break out of the circle.

Bezarin fired at the ground, putting the round very close to the girl’s tormentor.

All of the men turned to face him, one even lifting his assault rifle. As soon as they recognized an officer, they all straightened, backing away from the girl as if it was only an accident that she and they were discovered in the same place. The soldier who had raised his weapon quickly lowered it.

“Pigs,” Bezarin shouted at them. “You shit-eating pigs. What do you think you’re doing?”

None of the soldiers responded. Bezarin cursed himself empty, then could find no sensible words to express himself, and a difficult silence enveloped them. He almost launched into an angry series of platitudes about their duty and mission and the trust of the Soviet soldier. But this was all much too immediately human and terrible for classroom phrases.

Bezarin shook his head in disgust. “All of you. Get back to your vehicles. Now.”

The soldiers obeyed immediately. Bezarin watched them go, weapon at the ready. He did not fully trust these strangers now.

And yet… they were his soldiers. They had fought together, and they would undoubtedly be forced to fight together again before the war ended for them.

Bezarin turned to the girl, embarrassed more by what his soldiers had done than by her charmless nakedness. He took care to look only at her face, which was red and beyond the range of normal expression. Still, she backed nervously against a smashed automobile, as though she expected Bezarin to become her next tormentor.

“Go,” Bezarin said. “Get out of here. Your people are up there.” He pointed, wishing he could tell her in her language.

“Go,” he barked. He did not know what else to do. There were still shots and cries, and he had no doubt that his experience of what his soldiers were really like had not yet come to an end. He wanted to get away from here, away from this lost girl. But he was afraid to leave her alone.

The girl covered herself with her hands, tugging down the torn sweater in a hopelessly inadequate gesture. Bezarin closed on her, watching her fear grow. But he had no time to waste. He grabbed her by the upper arm and dragged her along so swiftly that she could not resist. He drew her to the edge of the highway, facing the now-silent ridgeline from where her would-be guardians had come. Another small horror awaited him as he discovered a tumbled clutter of bodies in the drainage ditch by the roadside and trailing away from the raised berm.

“Go,” Bezarin ordered, pointing the way with his weapon. Visibility was far too good, despite the residue of battle smoke, and he worried that enemy aircraft would descend upon them. He knew he had to get his troops back under control, to get moving again.

He pushed the girl toward the enemy’s hill. She looked at him in fear and confusion. He pointed again.

Either the girl finally understood him or she simply obeyed what she perceived to be his desire. She began to pick her way down between the corpses. As her foot touched one of them the body moved with a life of its own, and Bezarin realized that, surely, there were many wounded along the column and out in the fields. But he could not cope with that issue now; he had no assets, and he had a mission to fulfill. He struggled to shut his mind to the welling visions.

He stepped back behind the cover of an abandoned vehicle and watched the girl go. She was a scrawny thing, little more than a child, and her naked behind looked like two stingy pouches of skin tucked onto a skeleton. Bezarin could not imagine anyone having sexual feelings for her. As she worked her way up through the field her half nakedness called up nothing in him but a sense of human weakness, of the miserable level to which human life was reduced in the end.

At the sound of a single shot, the girl flung an arm into the air, as if waving to someone in the distance, and dark blood splashed from the hollow under her shoulder. An instant later she collapsed, disappearing into the shimmering grass.

Bezarin’s other officers had been more successful than their commander, and he was pleased to learn that none of his tankmen had abandoned their tanks to participate in the free-for-all violence with the motorized riflemen. He took some comfort in the thought that the men he had trained himself remained disciplined soldiers.

Bezarin threatened Lasky, the commander of the attached motorized rifle troops, with a court-martial under wartime conditions in accordance with the provisions of Article 24 if he lost control again. Failure to act, under battlefield circumstances, could be punishable by death. Bezarin made the threat just as his anger peaked, and as he began to realize how deeply the episode had shaken Lasky, he regretted having made it. None of the motorized rifle officer’s school training or unit experience had prepared him for this. Lasky stuttered, half-pleading, insisting that such a thing would never — could never — happen again. Bezarin had read and been told many times how war made boys into men. Yet the very opposite seemed true. Men who swaggered across the parade ground and bullied their way through the administrative rigors of peacetime soldiering became as helpless as children in the face of battle. Bezarin thought again of Tarashvili, his regimental commander, and of Lieutenant Roshchin, the boy who had broken down on the battlefield and perished with his company. Lasky appeared to be so unnerved that Bezarin wondered if he would go into shock. Where in the program of instruction did they teach you how to handle officers who went to pieces in combat? Or who were frightened into stasis by the unexpected behavior of their men? Having begun by raging at Lasky, Bezarin found himself spending precious time in an attempt to rebuild the officer’s confidence, to put him back in control of himself and his men. He assured Lasky that there would be a chance to even things up at the river, if not before, although he knew that there would be a price to pay for this massacre — Bezarin could find no other word for it — and that he and Lasky were the two officers most likely to face a military tribunal.

“It’s all right,” Bezarin said. “The men are back in their squad groups with their vehicles. All you have to do is go through the motions. They’ll listen to you. They’ve got it out of their systems. Just show them you’re in control.”

But the motorized rifleman could not control his hands well enough to light his cigarette. Bezarin lit one for him, then guided it into the other man’s hand. Lasky’s fingers felt like electric wires, frantic with too much current. He gripped the cigarette so hard that the small paper tube bent as he jammed it between his lips. Bezarin turned his back, unable to spare another moment. He felt as though he had squandered his efforts reinforcing failure. Lasky would have to make it on his own, as would every one of them, in the end. The thing now was to move.

Bezarin had lost two more tanks and three infantry fighting vehicles, along with most of the crew members. He loaded his wounded into the largest, sturdiest civilian vehicles that remained in running order, then he put a medical orderly in charge of two riflemen who claimed they could drive. Bezarin directed the orderly to retrace the detachment’s route as best he could, stressing that it was essential to put enough distance between his charges and the scene of the engagement to disassociate the wounded men from the massacre. He worried that any enemy forces or even civilians in the area would take vengeance upon his wounded. Bezarin wished the orderly luck, unhopeful.

Nothing more could be done. The Germans or the English would have to tend their own casualties. Bezarin forcefully shut his mind to the suffering around him. But a part of him felt as though he were the lone occupant of a fragile boat in the middle of a storm at sea. All a man could do was hang on.

He moved along his disordered line of vehicles, shouting at officers and men to mount up, to regroup their platoons. He screamed and cursed at them all until his voice began to fail, and even then he forced the mingled commands and obscenities out of his raw throat. He sensed that the only way to hold his dwindling unit together was by sheer force of will.

The unit pulled together. The vehicles had a battered, overloaded look, a caravan of military gypsies. Camouflage nets trailed over decks, and stowage boxes had been torn open. Vehicle fenders had twisted into chaotic shapes, and cartridge casings littered every flat surface on the infantry fighting vehicles. The self-propelled guns worked their way down from the ridge, and, at Bezarin’s wave, the little column began to move again. He had heard nothing from Dagliev’s advance element, but he contented himself with the thought that he had told the company commander to use the radio only to warn of trouble ahead. He took the quiet as a positive sign.

Bezarin had directed that the vehicles maintain twenty-meter intervals, but the difficulty of moving along the refugee column soon squeezed that distance down to an average of less than ten meters. He allowed the crowding as long as they marched immediately beside the panic-stricken traffic, sensing that his enemy would not stage an air attack against his column as long as it hugged living refugees. Besides, he did not want to lose control of a single vehicle.

He had issued strict orders to cause no wanton damage. But the panic that flowed like a bow wave in front of the armor caused the refugees to harm themselves in their desperation, and collisions proved unavoidable. Bezarin clenched himself as tightly as possible, forcing his mind not to accept the implications of the string of small tragedies that marked the path of his tanks. He peered forward, unseeing, as his war machines rumbled to the west. He scanned the sky and the rising line of mountains that hid the Weser, shutting out everything but the mission of reaching and crossing the river. His tanks rode the berm of the highway or took short detours along parallel routes and across the fields wherever the debris and confusion of the human flood threatened to become overwhelming. Here and there, bombed-out enemy march columns blocked the way, blackened trucks steering into eternity, their drivers crude, shrunken figures carved from charcoal. Several times, enemy aircraft boomed overhead. But their rockets and bombs never sought Bezarin. He did not know whether or not they were even aware of his column, whether their ordnance was predestined for other, greater threats than the one his presence posed. He only knew the sudden intervals of terror, almost impossible to master, as the jets came screaming down along the highway, seemingly aimed straight for his tanks, only to blast on by to the east.

Intermittently, Bezarin’s forward detachment surprised enemy soldiers in stray transport vehicles or perched along the side of the road, tasked to administer the rear area. Some attempted to fight it out. Bezarin’s vehicles cut them down. Others, astonished, simply raised their hands in surrender and went ignored. Bezarin refused to permit his tiny force to be diverted. He wondered what had become of Dagliev’s advance element. When he tried to raise him on the radio, there was no answer. Neither was there any sign of his passage. Bezarin relegated the Dagliev problem to his list of lesser concerns so long as things were going well.

The column seemed to be touring the guts of the enemy formations now, the individually unimportant targets that joined in a great combination to make a modern army function. The Soviet tanks and infantry fighting vehicles merely raked the sites with machine-gun fire from the move. The only sharply focused efforts at destruction were directed against enemy vehicles with antennae in evidence. Bezarin did not intend to give the enemy any free intelligence on his location. When the path to the west led his tanks around a congested village and right through the middle of a British vehicle-repair site, Bezarin almost lost control of his force again. The target seemed too rich to be passed by, crowded with equipment and technicians, and officers and men took it upon themselves to destroy as much as possible. Bezarin screamed into his microphone, whipping his officers back into column formation with more curses and threats. Even as he shouted, he wondered how much longer he would be able to keep it up, how long his willpower would endure. Then he barked another command and forced his self-doubt down into a private dungeon. The unit pulled away from the support site, spraying suppressive light-weapons fire in its wake to prevent the British from employing any man-packed antitank weapons.

Bezarin felt certain that the enemy must know his location by now, and he pounded at the rim of his turret hatch when another clot of vehicles at a valley crossroads brought his tanks to a halt. Threats and warning shots failed to undo the great knot of vehicles, and Bezarin finally directed his driver to batter the civilian vehicles out of their path. The destruction seemed vicious and senseless and unavoidable to Bezarin. As if in punishment, one of Lasky’s infantry fighting vehicles threw a track as it attempted to work its way up out of a field and across a lateral road. There was no time to repair the vehicle, simple though the operation would have been, and Bezarin ordered that it be further disabled. Then the crew mounted up with their more fortunate comrades. Bezarin felt as though fate were chipping away at him, defying him to reach the river. Yet there was good fortune, too. His tanks were obviously moving faster than the enemy could react, and none of the bridges over the tertiary streams had been blown. The passage of local water gaps, which might have held up the column, merely involved clearing off the refugee traffic. And as Bezarin’s vehicles raced past still more British support sites, it was apparent that none of them had been forewarned. The British were in a process of dissolution without even knowing it.

Twilight began to wander down out of the side valley and treelines. The darkening shapes of low mountains rose, threatening to bar the way to the river like black fortress walls. As his column worked its way along the valley bottoms Bezarin recognized the possibility of an ambush from which there would be no way out. But the anticipated enemy fires failed to materialize, and each minute brought the Soviet tanks closer to the river.

Dagliev finally reported in. The advance element, intended to provide security and reconnaissance for the main column, had long since branched off on another route to the northwest, weaving into the mountains. That at least partially explained to Bezarin why the British had so consistently been unprepared for his arrival. Dagliev swore he had been trying to call in for hours but had been unable to raise Bezarin on the net, probably because the intervening mountains had blocked him from radio line of sight. Bezarin lost his temper. He could not understand how Dagliev could have diverged so widely from the anticipated route. Dagliev made a series of excuses, but the most telling point was that, despite his error, the company commander was within a half-hour’s march of the Bad Oeynhausen bridgehead. He had found an open road into the Weser hills. Accepting the situation, despite the residue of his anger, Bezarin ordered Dagliev to push on for the bridgehead without delay and link up with the air-assault forces.

Bezarin could not sort out his feelings with any clarity. Part of him tensed with jealousy that Dagliev had pushed so far ahead of the main body. By sticking to the most obvious route, Bezarin had lost time in the exodus of refugees. Dagliev had almost reached the objective, while he was struggling up the valleys, skirting to the north around the pink glow over the ridges that marked Hameln, and accomplishing little more than frightening a few British mess sergeants. Additionally, Bezarin felt newly vulnerable now that he knew for certain he had no security force in front of his column, and his mind filled with the varieties of possible dangers. Still, he decided that it would not do to stop and push forward another reconnaissance and security element. His force had shrunken to too small a size to permit any further detachments, and he was not even sure he had an officer left that he could trust to find his way efficiently in the dark. Bezarin decided to alter his course to reach the river valley as directly as possible. He calculated that he could strike the river at Rinteln, then work up the river valley. He reasoned that the refugee flow would have little reason to move northwest along the route he anticipated taking. In any case, he wanted to get clear of the mountain valleys.

The twilight deepened into a pale darkness, with night descending over the landscape like layers of silk. He would keep his force together and move as fast as he could. They were so close now. All the consequences could be sorted out later. The repercussions from the massacre along the highway were likely to be so severe that Bezarin reasoned he could do little to worsen the situation. It was time to take risks. Even if they were to court-martial him and have him shot, Bezarin had made up his mind on one thing. They would not do it before he reached the river.

Bezarin’s force seized the Weser River bridge at Rinteln almost by accident. It had not been part of the plan. The objective remained the crossing site at Bad Oeynhausen. But just as the remains of Bezarin’s unit straggled down out of the hills toward the river road junction at Rinteln, Dagliev radioed in with news both good and bad. He had managed to link up with the air-assault forces on the near bank at Bad Oeynhausen. But hard fighting continued at the crossing site, and he could not get his armored vehicles across the bridge because it lay in a direct line of fire from enemy positions on high ground just to the south. The enemy had not managed to blow the bridge before the air-assault forces seized bridgeheads on both banks, but now they were shelling it with everything they had, trying to drop it into the water or at least prevent anyone from crossing it. Still, the artillery could be managed. It was the direct fire threat that had brought any further progress to a halt. The twin Soviet bridgeheads could not move to support each other, and Dagliev suspected that the enemy would attempt to counterattack, reasoning that it would be foolish to waste any more time. The tension in Dagliev’s voice reassured Bezarin’s battered ego, and he felt a fresh surge of energy. There were problems to be solved, and he was the man to solve them.

The map showed a bridge at Rinteln. If it had not been blown, its seizure would allow Bezarin to move up behind the enemy on the west bank of the river. If the bridge was blown, or if he failed, he risked losing precious time in a fight in the town, perhaps even losing his force. But he could not see how his vehicles would make much difference if they simply marched up to the same near-bank bridgehead that Dagliev had reached. Bezarin took one last hard look at the map, inspecting the road net on the west bank of the river. There appeared to be a direct road along the Weser that would bring him out in the enemy’s rear. If he could get across at Rinteln. Bezarin took his decision.

He led his shrunken column directly for the bridge. He hoped to achieve surprise, to seize the crossing before the enemy could prepare or implement the destruction of the bridge. Immediately, everything seemed to go wrong.

On the outskirts of Rinteln, Bezarin’s tanks hit another traffic jam. More refugee traffic had been held up in an effort to evacuate a British column of artillery to the west bank of the Weser. Bezarin ordered his tankmen to open fire on the guns, and to sweep the support vehicles with machine-gun fire. But his objective was not the destruction of enemy forces. They were distinctly secondary to the prize of the bridge and the importance of reaching the bridgehead at Bad Oeynhausen. But nothing could be done about the situation. To reach the bridge, they would have to fight through the British column; yet, as they destroyed the British vehicles, the hulks blocked further progress.

The firefight threw brilliant lines of color across the night, while the explosions of on-board magazines and soft-skinned support vehicles soon decorated the edge of the town with a garden of fire.

“Lasky,” Bezarin called into his microphone, “get those little bastards of yours out of their vehicles and go for the bridge. Just follow the main road. I’ll try to work the tanks around. But get to the damned bridge before they blow it.”

Lasky acknowledged the order. His voice sounded excited, but not as shaken as it had come across back on the highway, amid the shot-down refugees. Bezarin hoped Lasky would be able to do his job this time.

Bezarin led the tanks in a detour around the back of the town, looking for another way in. He feared getting bogged down in street fighting, where a few soldiers with antitank weapons could put an end to his mission on the spot. But he saw no alternative to running for the bridge.

The firefight had nearly blinded him, and he ordered his driver to turn on the running lights, aware that he was setting himself up as a perfect target. But he found a side street that opened into the fields. He led his tanks into the town.

They moved through a residential section, chewing curbs into dust and grinding down fences and hedges. From a distance of several hundred meters, Bezarin could feel the secondary explosions from the stricken British column. He ordered his self-propelled battery to assume hasty positions on the edge of town. There was no point in simply dragging them into town behind the tanks.

The streets wound in arcs and twists. Bezarin had a sense of simply wandering about in circles as he struggled to find a main artery that would put him on a course for the bridge. At each small intersection, he rose in his turret, scanning the alternatives, waiting for a light antitank weapon to seek him out.

In his urgency to reach the bridge, Bezarin turned his tank into a street that soon began to narrow dangerously. The buildings converged so tightly that he feared his tank might get caught in a vise between them. The bent fender of his vehicle scraped noisily against concrete. When Bezarin looked behind him, he saw the looming black shapes of his remaining tanks tucked in so closely on his tail that it would take an hour to back them up and turn them around.

“Can you make it?” Bezarin asked his driver.

“I don’t know, Comrade Commander.”

So. The decision was his alone.

“Go,” Bezarin said. “Let’s try it.”

The tank’s exhaust coughed, like a giant clearing his throat. The tank’s metal screamed along the walls in the narrow alley.

In a moment, they were through. Released, the tank shot ahead.

“Stop,” Bezarin shouted. “Halt. Back up.” He had caught a glimpse of something as they rolled across an intersection.

He guided his driver backward just as the next tank in line came up in their rear. The vehicles almost collided. But off to the left, down another, blessedly wider alley, Bezarin could see the dark span of an intact bridge rising against the sky.

Bezarin helped his driver turn the vehicle in the cramped space, sweating, shifting his eyes back to the bridge again and again. He expected it to erupt in flames at any moment.

“Lasky,” Bezarin called, “can you hear me? Where are you?”

The motorized rifle officer did not respond. Bezarin wondered if he had even taken a dismount radio with him.

As his tank nosed out into the open near the deck of the bridge Bezarin could see the vivid traces of action back in the center of the town. The guardians of the bridge were giving Lasky a tough time of it. But they had left the bridge itself virtually undefended. A few British military policemen fired their small arms at the tank, forcing Bezarin down behind the shield of his hatch cover. But his machine gun soon drove them to ground. He hoped there would not be too many more of them. He was nearly out of machine-gun ammunition, and he had no main-gun rounds to waste. As the next tanks in column came up behind him Bezarin ordered his driver forward. They had approached the bridge at an awkward angle, and it proved difficult to maneuver up onto the deck of the bridge. To his rear, the next tank worked its pivots.

It was possible, he realized, that the British were set to blow the bridge, that they were only holding off until Soviet vehicles filled its span before they dropped everything into the river. But he could not wait for Lasky’s dismounted troops to work their way up to check for demolitions. Success could be a matter of a few minutes, of seconds. At the same time, Bezarin’s overwhelming emotion was not fear, but a peculiar sort of joy, of fervor. He had reached the river. If he had to go, this was as fine a moment as he could imagine. But he did not really believe that he was going to die. He felt as confident as he had ever felt in his life. His tank snorted and began to accelerate.

The bridge had cleared of traffic during the assault. Bezarin rolled across a span that lay empty save for a single broken-down British personnel carrier. He rode high in the turret again, ready with the last few rounds in his machine gun. He sensed that he had just become a part of history, and it filled him with a thrilling bigness. He felt as though he could accomplish anything in the world. Below him, the dark, murky waters seemed almost alive, and resentful. The river caught fractured patterns of light from the fires back in the town. But there was no beauty to it. It reminded Bezarin of a sewer.

He looked to the rear. His second tank followed him, and a third was steering around the obstructions to come up on the bridge. Suddenly, small-arms fire broke out from the shadowy clutter of buildings on the far shore, and random shots pinged off the glacis of Bezarin’s tank. He dropped back inside the turret. The tank’s infrared searchlight revealed a few probable vehicles well up on the far bank, arranged to exploit the intermittent fields of fire allowed by the antique cram of the village. But they didn’t look like — didn’t feel like — tanks. And no main guns fired at him. Bezarin ordered his gunner to hold his fire. They were too low on main-gun rounds to waste a single shot, and they would need to fight their way into Bad Oeynhausen. Bezarin decided to take the risk of simply racing through the funnel of the built-up area. He got on the radio and ordered his other tanks to follow him, but to hold their fire unless it proved necessary to suppress local targets.

He tried again to call Lasky. But there was nothing on the airwaves except intense static and faint ghosts of other men’s voices. He wanted to direct Lasky to remain and hold the bridge at all costs. But, unable to contact him, he could only hope that Lasky would grasp the dictates of the situation. Bezarin did not intend to accept any further delay. He would take his remaining tanks on to Bad Oeynhausen. The motorized riflemen, the artillery, everyone else could remain at Rinteln. Nothing, not even unit integrity, was more important than time.

Bezarin’s tank rolled off the bridge. Roaring up the canyon of shops and houses, he paid out a few more rounds of machine-gun fire, hoping to discourage any hidden antitank grenadiers. A signature in the path of the infrared searchlight baffled him for a moment. Then he realized that the crossing site was well-protected, indeed, but against the wrong threat. The path of Bezarin’s tanks led through the middle of a NATO air-defense missile unit. The enemy had anticipated air assaults or air attacks on the Rinteln crossing. But they had not expected Soviet armor to penetrate so deeply so fast.

Bezarin managed to contact his self-propelled battery, which lay on the other side of the river now, deployed against an orchard. He ordered the battery commander to wait five minutes for the tanks to transit the area, then to open fire on the far side of the river. He also directed the artilleryman to use his long-range radio set to contact any higher station he could raise, reporting the situation at Rinteln and that Bezarin was leading his remaining tanks directly on Bad Oeynhausen. Finally, the battery commander was to track down Lasky and order him to remain and hold the bridge, literally to the last man.

Bezarin’s last tank in column reported that it had thrown a track making the pivot up onto the bridge.

Bezarin sensed that he could not wait. And he wanted the artillery to destroy the enemy air-defense unit before it could move. He ordered the crippled vehicle to remain where it was to support the motorized rifle troops. Bezarin’s tank had already reached an open expanse of highway, where the thoroughfare was bothered only by intermittent wreckage and the occasional lost or straggling refugees. First he would go west, then, picking up the river road, he would wind around until he turned northward for Bad Oeynhausen. There were still tens of kilometers to cover. But the way was clear. He tried to call Dagliev, to assure him that help was on the way. The geography of the river valley prevented his attempt at communicating. But Bezarin remained marvelously calm. Another few kilometers and he would try the radio again. And he would keep on trying until he raised Dagliev. And then he would reach the objective with his tanks. In the meantime, Bezarin allowed himself to relax, ever so slightly, and to enjoy the feeling of driving unopposed through the heart of West Germany.

Bezarin’s handful of tanks shot their way onto the high ground south of Bad Oeynhausen with their last rounds. One last, vital time they managed to surprise the enemy, and they caught a series of tank and infantry fighting vehicle positions in the rear. The enemy vehicles had been positioned so that they could kill anything that tried to cross the main highway bridge to the north. But they had become so preoccupied with that task that they had totally neglected the possibility of a threat from behind their positions. Bezarin’s tanks destroyed every enemy vehicle on the hill.

Hurriedly, he radioed Dagliev to tell everyone in the bridgeheads to hold their fire. Then he split his tiny force in two, leaving half of it to hold the high ground and taking what amounted to a platoon of tanks down the hill toward the big bridge, firing colored flares to indicate to the air-assault troops that his was a Soviet force. Some small-arms fire came his way, despite his precautions, but it only managed to force Bezarin back inside the turret.

Dagliev had moved his tanks over the bridge as soon as he saw the firefight on the high ground, and he awaited Bezarin just off the western approach to the bridge. The air-assault unit commander came out to meet Bezarin as well. The officers hugged each other, oblivious to the nearby impact of artillery rounds that a single day before would have sent them scrambling for cover. Dagliev looked filthy, even in the darkness, covered with oil and the residue of gunnery. The air-assault lieutenant colonel looked even worse, grimed with blood, soot, and mud. It was all very much unlike the movies about the Great Patriotic War in terms of glamorous appearance, Bezarin thought. But the emotional power seemed incomparably greater.

The air-assault commander was disappointed to learn how few tanks Bezarin had with him, and he was alarmed to hear that they were virtually out of ammunition. But Bezarin felt confident. Surely, the enemy had received reports that Soviet tanks had entered Bad Oeynhausen. That would slow down any planned countermeasures until the enemy assessed the impact of the change in the situation.

Bezarin ordered Dagliev to recross to the east bank and block any enemy counterattacks from that direction, then he returned to properly position his remaining tanks against a threat from the south or west. Small-arms engagements continued to flare in the center of the town, but the noise did not seem to worry the air-assault commander. The bridge, after all, was everything.

Now it was a matter of waiting to see who would arrive first, an enemy counterattack or formations of Soviet armor. Bezarin expected more high drama, perhaps even a sort of siege. But reality disappointed him. More small Soviet elements began to filter in, while some reconnaissance elements pushed on to the west. Another forward detachment found its way through, and its commander was disappointed that Bezarin had beaten him to the linkup. Regimental forward security detachments and advance guards arrived, often with vehicles from different units jumbled together. Lead elements from an army corps appeared, demanding that their vehicles receive unconditional right-of-way. The orders of march often made little sense, judged by the prescriptions of the manuals. But within an hour, enough combat power had crossed the Bad Oeynhausen bridge to hold the area against any counterattack the enemy was likely to launch. When Bezarin reestablished radio contact with his elements left behind at Rinteln, he learned that other Soviet units were crossing there, as well.

Mission accomplished, Bezarin attempted to make out his after-action report, huddled in the stinking interior of his tank. He felt a desperate need to explain the day’s events from the perspective of his battalion. He was unsure whether he was a hero or a war criminal. He intended to be as honest as possible about the situation that had gotten out of hand during the engagement amid the refugee column. He wanted to get it out in the open. He did not intend to live with it as a secret, like one of the tormented characters in Anna’s beloved novels. In any case, he doubted that it would be possible to hide it. It was too big, too terrible. He remembered the girl in the torn sweater, how her arm had flown high over a spray of blood in the moment before she fell. In his imagination, he could see each of her bony fingers, reaching higher and higher, even though she had been too far away for him actually to have made out the fine details he now traced in his mind. Then the fleeing girl was Anna, reaching to touch the coppery leaves of a birch tree in the Galician autumn, and it all made perfect sense to him as he fell into an iron sleep.