‘Driver,’ he said.
‘Forward.’
The Tiger was the first to move into the vapor. In seconds the other tanks in Luis’s company were no longer mesmerized, they lurched, keeping formation. Behind his company the rest of the regiment shivered alive to creak down the incline. Luis had moved on, piercing the color and stink of the canisters ahead of the others.
‘Balthasar.’
The purple fumes parted, whipped by a breeze flitting off the river.
Through fissures in the smoke, Luis caught strains of gold. His Tiger pushed on and downward. Then, with a suddenness that surprised him, the smoke was whipped away.
On all sides, his company rolled out of the shroud, emerging onto the slope above the immense sunflower field. The tall flowers seemed to reflect their blazing color onto the battle mists and the smoke drifting overhead. Luis recalled the childhood game of holding buttercups under his friends’ chins, to see if they liked butter. Luis cast his eyes to the right, at the easternmost slope where the sounds of small-arms fire erupted. The Red infantry regiment and the grenadiers were locked in their own battle there. The sunflower field beckoned, as it had done since he arrived in Russia.
He shook his head.
‘Trap,’ he muttered.
He raised his right arm high, and at the same time gave the order to the driver, then the radio, to halt. The command went out to the rest of the company, then was taken up by the other tanks of the regiment. The grating of treads ceased all along the slope. The flowers stood two hundred meters away, their heads turned east to the sun and the carnage.
Luis looked to the west, to the flatland stemming from the river.
It took him a moment to find them across the bright corner of the sunflowers, the petals so infected the light, but there they were: the first stab from the Soviet offensive into this nodding yellow valley. Three dozen T-34s, maybe more, flowed out of cover from the two villages on the riverbank. They’d been lagered among the buildings, out of sight, planning to hit the Germans in the flank the moment the panzers crossed into the field. Luis’s regiment would never have been able to turn fast enough into the assault. The T-34s were intended to hit hard and fast at the vulnerable sides of the Tigers and Mark IVs. There would have been chaos and destruction in the sunflowers, if Luis had not stopped on the slope.
His tanks retained enough of the high ground to have an advantage over the rushing Reds. Had the Russians timed their move better, had they held off another minute until Luis became lulled or impatient enough to enter the valley, their strategy would have worked, the wound would have been deep. But now Luis brought Balthasar to bear. Along the slope, the other gunners turned also to meet the attack.
‘Range.’
‘Eighteen hundred fifty meters. Closing.’
‘At will, gunner.’
Luis no longer specified which shells or targets to choose. The gunner and his loader knew when to use AP or high-explosive rounds. And Balthasar had an uncanny knack for identifying which of the Soviet tanks was the boldest.
Balthasar fired; the fifteen Mark IVs in his company followed. The rest of the regiment opened up. The collective roar was enormous! In one heartbeat the first rank of T-34s took the hits. A dozen of the sixty-seven rounds fired in the opening salvo found their marks. The field geysered on all sides of the rushing Reds. More than a kilometer away, Luis saw two Soviet turrets catapult into the air on jets of steam, going off like teakettles, their ammo lit up from the intense heat of the shells piercing their compartments. The Russians did not veer from the battering but pressed through the edge of the sunflowers, wheeling into the killing range of the handful of Tigers on the slope and inevitably into the reach of the Mark IVs’
smaller cannons. Inside a minute every
guns raging away above their heads. The corner of the golden field they stormed across was marred again and again under raining shells and the cremation of metal and man. Luis stood in his hatch and marveled at the Russians, not for the first time, but he felt, finally, watching this unreasoning rush into his blazing cannons, that he fully understood them. They were unfeeling to fear, remorseless to loss. They were brutes, truly. Do they feel nothing of their own danger? How can they run at my cannons? Don’t they know what I will do to them the closer they come?
Ruin, Luis thought. I will ruin them with blood. I’ll gut them.
What will it take to make them give way?
Luis wanted, needed, what existed on the other side of them. The Russians stood in the path of his freedom from this wretched body, they kept him from Spain and the misting Ramblas fountains, away from hands that were not afraid to touch him. Luis wanted to scream the things that welled inside him, make them a cannon shot.
The pulse in Luis’s right hand urged at him. All his anger at the Russians and their refusal to stand aside was there in the fist. He slammed it onto the turret. The hand landed hard, not enough meat on it anymore to cushion the blow. The partisan in the hand would not stop wailing, the hundred dead bulls bellowed warnings to him. He narrowed his eyes at the nearest T-34, just six hundred meters away. The first ring of smoke puffed from the barrel of this hard-charging Russian tank, though Luis knew in another moment it was a dead tank, it ran straight into the sight of his own massive gun. Balthasar had the bastard Russian in his sights so close, the gunner was aiming straight down the barrel. Luis could not believe it when the Red shell hit his Tiger.
His feet were knocked out from under him with a tremendous clang.
He slipped and fell into the hatch, slamming his chin against the cupola. He saw splinters of light and crumpled across the arm of his commander’s seat. He was aware of the main gun breech below his legs heaving
