The round missed.
The regimental net scratched like an old phonograph record. “This is Ural Five. I’m in trouble.
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.
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.
“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.
“Roshchin,” he called. “Get a grip on yourself. Fight, you son of a whore, or they
“Five hundred…
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.
“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.
“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.
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.
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?”
“Good.
