Last Citadel

But Valentin. What was he doing?

Dimitri ran. His hip stabbed at every step but he would not let it slow him. He crashed over the few standing sunflowers rather than run around them. He was halfway to the General when he stopped.

Forty meters away, the commander’s hatch cover to the General fell and clinched down. Dimitri’s chest seized. Moments later, he watched the driver’s door shut, too. He could hear the hard metal clangs, like a closing cell.

Valya had seen him coming. He was not going to leave the tank.

Dimitri screamed across the distance, into the bellow of cannons and screeching shells. He bent double at the waist and balled his fists.

The General stood stoic, weeping smoke. The two stood, man and tank, father and son, both exhausted and glaring and absolute.

Then Valentin answered Dimitri. The turret of the dead tank, facing the opposite direction, began to rotate, creaking, turned by the hand crank.

The General’s engine and all power were down. But the gun still worked. And Valentin was still the gunner.

‘No,’ Dimitri protested, knowing the word was useless.

The Tiger.

Dimitri cursed and tore his eyes to the left, across the earsplitting valley. Four hundred meters off, the monstrous German tank was withdrawing, backing away with its frontal armor toward the field. Valentin was going to take another shot.

‘At what?’ Dimitri raged at his son. ‘At what? The fucking thing is leaving, let it go! You can’t hurt it, let it go!’

Valentin had no angle if the German retired straight up the slope. Any shell smacking that thick hide would only snag the Tiger’s attention and get an answering .88 mm round, aimed at a motionless, defenseless T-34.

Valya said the two of them had traded places. That Dimitri was not ready for it. Dimitri thought now, we have not traded this place, father and son. You will not die first, boy.

‘No,’ he said again.

This time the word did not feel so without purpose on his lips.

Dimitri whirled from the General. Four other T-34s knocked out by the Tiger were within running distance. If he could find one of them that still had a working cannon, he would…

Before he could take a step, a Mark IV bore down on him out of a patch of sunflowers. He caught the sparking of the machine-gun in the corner of the glacis plate. Bullets ripped up the steppe near his boots, others zinged past like hellion bees. He dove to the dirt. He barely heard the zip of the machine-gun in the loudness of the battle and the crunching of the tracks. The machine-gun looked for him, tossing stalks and dirt into the air, then paused. Dimitri lifted his head out of his hands. The Mark IV

still barreled straight for him.

‘Damn it,’ Dimitri sputtered and jumped off the ground, gritting his teeth against the pain in his leg. He had to lead the Mark IV away from the General. He couldn’t let the German spot Valya turning the T-34’s turret.

And he couldn’t run back to the crater where Pasha and Sasha lay shaken and bleeding. He sprinted across the field, scrambling over trampled flowers and the dimpled ruts of tank tracks. He headed toward the nearest of the dead T-34s killed by the Tiger. The Red tank was sixty meters off, he needed all his speed. He pumped his arms and the Mark IV turned with him.

Bullets hacked at the ground behind him. He wove his way to the T-34, each shift of direction shot bolts of agony out of his hip. This Red tank was not burned like the others that had died near it. A wide hole had been bored neatly through the middle of the turret. At this range, the Tiger’s big cannon had drilled a shell right through one side of the T-34 and out the other! He had only that instant to marvel, the Mark IV’s machine-gunner cut loose again. Dimitri threw himself between the T-34’s treads just ahead of a sickle of bullets slashing at the soles of his airborne boots. He hit and skidded under the tank, his hip hurt so much, he thought he might have taken a bullet in it. Thirty meters away the Mark IV curled a small semicircle, pondering whether to keep up the chase against this lone tanker, then lost interest and veered away to another of the hundred duels raging in the valley. Dimitri peered out into the rain and watched the tank rumble past the General. The German did not see Valya’s slowly rotating gun.

Dimitri rolled onto his back. His hip smarted enough to force a tear down his cheek. He heaved for breath.

Just above his nose, the hard belly of the T-34 rattled. Dimitri smelled exhaust.

The tank was running.

Dimitri swept aside his pain again and thrust himself out from between the treads. The hatch was open. The driver was gone, so was the machine-gunner. He spun to look one more time at the General. Valya had the turret cranked halfway around to the escaping Tiger. In another fifteen seconds he’d have the gun in position. Dimitri hoisted himself up on the T-34’s fender. He stepped down into the driver’s hatch. He bent his knees and descended.

Dimitri almost leaped back out. Blood was everywhere. His feet reached for the pedals, skimming through a horrible slick in the bottom of the tank. The driver’s gauges and controls were splashed red. Dimitri whirled behind him and recoiled at the bodies of the commander and leader. The German .88 shell had cut through them both; the commander had been standing when the round entered, he was split and folded over at the ribs, his two halves were toppled on their sides, spilling entrails and every fluid the body courses, his shocked face toppled between his own boots. The loader was slumped in his seat, headless. The German shell had cut through his neck, then exited the turret beside him. The neat hole leaving the armor was rimmed with gore where the pressure sucked out, taking the loader’s head with it. Shrapnel had whittled both bodies with a thousand crimson pits, their coveralls were shredded. The smell of death cooped in this tank was overpowering: gut, bile, and blood mingled to make the compartment ferocious and sickening. Dimitri gripped the steering levers. The driver and machine-gunner must have leaped out as soon as they discovered they were still alive, no reason to stay in this hellhole.