A match flashed beside Holly. A torch spluttered, caught, flung off a burning stench. Smoke sank in Holly's lungs.
Byrkin running. Beside him the man with the crowbar.
Holly pulled himself out from the shelter of the hut floorboards. He ran to catch them. Twenty yards to the tank. When does the bloody firing start? When do they start from the roof of the Administration building? The barrel depressing, falling towards the base of Hut 3. Five feet up to the platform above the tracks, and the tank still moving and his hands scrabbling for a grip, and running beside the tank.
Byrkin was on board, standing for a moment at his full height. God
… and Byrkin held the torch, Byrkin would draw the firing like a moth at a bloody lamp. The man with the crowbar was beside Byrkin now, pushing him down into the lee of the turret. Byrkin on his knees, reaching down for Holly, dragging him upwards, feet kicking past the ravaging tracks. He could hear the men shouting inside the tank, hear the stammer of their radio. A new concert of firing as the rifles on the Administration block joined battle, and then the answering blast from under Hut 3, and then more distantly from under Hut 6.
The man with the crowbar smashed his weapon against the cap of the petrol tank.
Holly held a pick-axe strapped to the turret. He found the driver's vision slit, and began to force the rags into the opening.
'Give me the fire, give me the bottle… '
The bottle first. Holding the pick-axe with one hand, pouring the paraffin onto the rags. He dropped the bottle, reached for the fire. A new sound for the crowbar, the sound of a pierced hole in light metal. Holly took the torch, touched the rags, jumped. Byrkin jumped. The man with the crowbar jumped.
The sheet of flame soared at the front of the tank and beneath the gun-barrel. Holly stood transfixed. God… they were screaming. The main armament fired into the lower walls of the side of Hut 3.
Couldn't move… and the torch was in his hand and his body was alive with light, and inside the tank they were screaming.
Byrkin snatched the torch from Holly, cudgelled him to the ground, then looped the flame towards the spilling petrol tank.
There was the petrol tank of the T34 to explode, there were five 1100mm armour-piercing shells inside the hull to detonate.
Between the two of them they shoved and dragged Holly away from the bonfire of the tank. He would have stood there, rooted in fascination, if they had not taken him. A shell exploded, there was the whine of shrapnel alive in the air. When they reached the far end of Hut 4 and could shelter behind the brick stilts, then Holly could kneel and watch the devastation that was the work of Byrkin, the former Petty Officer.
The monster had been halted. A heart of light amongst a rippling mirror of melted snow. Another explosion, another shell ignited. Hut 3 was ablaze. Crawling from the fire were the men who had fired the machine-gun, who had thrown the decoy bottles. And when they were moving they could not fire, and when they could not fire then the lone gun under Hut 6 could not stifle the shooting from the roof of the Administration building.
An eye for an eye. The machine-gun men in a searchlight beam.
A tooth for a tooth. The tracer finding them.
Death, where is thy sting? The sting is the tracer that tosses a man in the air, that hurtles another sideways, that breaks a gun into the useless metal of scrap.
'We have their tank, they have our throats,' Holly said.
The flames from Hut 3 and from the T34 tank served to darken the compound beyond the orbit of the fires. The searchlight had moved on, seeking a new prey. Together Holly and Byrkin scurried across the snow to the men who had tried to carry away the machine-gun. Blood on the snow. There was the bent shape, black and worthless, of the gun. One of the men lay still, the life frozen from him.
Another writhed in a death dance. Another moved haphaz-ardly in the dumb shock of a gunshot wound.
They started the long, crawling journey back towards the Kitchen.
The Colonel General now stood beside his Major. Dark-faced, harsh with anger.
'The t a n k…? '
'It's out''
A snapped instruction. 'Mortar them.'
'A particular target?'
'Random.'
'And the marksmen?'
'Everything.'
'There may be seven hundred men in the Kitchen.'
'Then they'd better be on the floor.'
'And the infantry?'
'I'm not losing more men.'
'You'll destroy the camp.'
'Before I lose one more man I will destroy the camp.'
The mortar shells popped in the tube, sighed in the air, whistled as they fell, thundered on impact.
The machine-guns traversed the ink-black space beneath the huts and ravaged through the windows. The tracers were one in four, red heat as they careered into bedding. The straw in the mattresses caught in the first flickers of fire.
The marksmen's bullets pecked sporadically at the windows of the Kitchen.
The flames licked up from the living huts and were fanned by a light wind.
The machine-gun under Hut 6 had fired occasionally since the full weight of the attack was directed on its position after the silencing of its partner. When the heat of that hut, burning too, became unendurable, the hiding- place was abandoned. The gun crew tried the long, long run for the open doorway of the Store shed. They were less than twenty metres from it when the searchlight found them. One man fell. Another stumbled, staggered inside the doorway. One man carried the machine-gun inside the safety of the cement-block structure. Another joined him. With their fingers they tore away a metal ventilation strip, gave themselves an aiming tunnel at the main camp gates. Their brief burst of firing, ill-directed and inaccurate, was sufficient to harden the Colonel General's resolve.
Systematically, steadily, the fabric of ZhKh 385/3/1 was razed to the ground by mortar shells, machine-gun bullets and fire. The low cloud over the compound was burned a golden orange.
Holly had reached the Kitchen.
In the murky light he could see only those zeks who were gathered at his end of the hall. The far end was a blackness of explosions, moaning, crying.
'We have more than twenty men hit here. We have nothing with which to treat them,' said Morozova.
'They're massacring us, Holly, we've nothing to protect ourselves,' said Poshekhonov.
'You are responsible for these people, Holly. They look to you. How much more will you ask of them?' said Feldstein. if you tell them to fight on, they will struggle with their teeth, with their fingers. You have their lives in your hands,' said Chernayev.
'We have to go on, Holly. They're going to shoot us anyway. Better while we are standing, better while we are free. After the tank there is no mercy. If we surrender now, it is to die in handcuffs,' said Byrkin.
'Do you trust me?'
'You have taken us this far,' said Poshekhonov.
The girl was watching him. She had blood on her hands.
A mortar shell burst close to the west wall of the Kitchen, and glass crashed and wood shrieked. A man screamed. The bullets pattered on the brickwork. He would lead them to hell, would he care if they returned? Slowly, carefully, Holly unbuttoned his tunic. It was cold in the Kitchen, bitter sub-zero cold. He shivered, then pulled off his shirt. He still wore the two vests that he had put on to crawl through the wire. The second vest was cleanest, whitest. He stripped off the under vest from his skin. The girl still watched him. He heard the sharp burst of firing from the Store. She looked at him with compassion, with the pity of a mother. He let the vest slip to the floor, and then began to put on again his top vest, his shirt, his tunic.
'Trust me… '
He stepped out of the doorway, waving his vest high above his head.
