Last Citadel

Filip cocked his weathered head at this. ‘Yes. Why?’

A prayer raced through Katya’s heart. ‘Did Nikolai ever travel to Tomarovka?’

‘Last week. They came and took him to Kazatskoe, three kilometers away’

Her heart cartwheeled at this news. Before she could explain, Daniel and Ivan tramped out of the bushes to them. Katya whispered to Filip,

‘Please, don’t tell anybody about this. Talk to me alone. Filip, please.’

‘Yes,’ the starosta beamed, glad at her urgency, he was needed for a secret with the Witch, the bloody partisan woman come back from the dead, ‘of course.’

Daniel and Ivan recoiled when they came close. Daniel gaped at the sight of her. Big Ivan was uncowed, he gathered Katya in his arms.

‘It was Daniel,’ Ivan bent low to her ear, ‘he said it was alright to blow it. I swear.’

‘I heard your horse take off, Witch,’ Daniel said. ‘I didn’t know you were still close to the tracks. The Germans were headed your way. I’m sorry’

‘Shut up,’ Josef barked, with no interest in whispering. ‘Saddle up.

Daniel, you ride with the prisoner. Up.’

Daniel made a helpless gesture at Katya, then grabbed the German soldier by the wrists and shoved him onto a horse. Ivan whined, ‘I told him to wait. But the guards got so close. Witch, are you alright?’

Katya moved beside an open saddle. The blood on her face and hands was drying to a rusty cake. She was a resurrection and a fright for the partisans, even Josef winced looking at her. With ease, without pain, she toed the stirrup, rose from the earth, and spurred the new horse away.

* * * *

CHAPTER 14

July 8

0450 hours

SS Leibstandarte situation room

Belgorod

With every telegram he handled, the partisan’s heart pumped in Luis’s hand. He took the pieces of paper, some yellow, some blue for urgent, and walked them to the map. The battle was a game, fleshless and compact. It was a slow-moving tide, black German markers inching toward the red sandcastles of the Soviet defenders. Luis did not let himself begin to hate what he was doing, presiding over numbers and stratagems, sliding blocks with shuffleboard sticks, breathing tobacco smoke and not the fumes of gunpowder and gasoline. Hatred was a commodity he would not waste on this map room and these clean liverymen of staff around him. He’d nibbled morsels throughout the first and second days of the battle, he’d slept no more than an hour at a time, sometimes on his feet leaning against a wall.

He never unbuttoned his collar. He hoarded his hatred, refusing to squander it on wooden armies. The throb in his knife hand reminded him of actions far beyond a paper field and a toy war.

Luis was naive on his first morning beside the map, the opening day of the battle. He did not understand how the black German blocks of Papa Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army could fail to push through the Red ones. The black had everything: air support, momentum, powerful new weapons, expert and experienced leaders at every level. Luis wanted to simply reach down to the map, sweep his arm through the red bits and push them aside, that was what Hoth was certain to do on the battlefield, what was so difficult? Those were Russian blocks, they were the ones that always were defeated, Verdad? But by the end of the first day, he’d read out eight separate messages from the 48th Panzer Corps, fighting on a fifteen-mile front alongside the Oboyan road, to the left of II SS Panzer Corps. The 48th was trying to keep up with the spectacular northward sweep of the three SS

panzer divisions; Totenkopf, Das Reich, and Leibstandarte had fought their way thirty-five kilometers from their jump-off positions, north past Smogodino and Luchki, through the Soviet 6th Army’s second defense belt. The 48th’s job was to protect the SS left flank by crossing the Luchanino River and taking Syrtsev and Alekseyevka, then reach the Psel River by nightfall. Eight times Luis watched the black blocks of the 48th charge across the green line of the Luchanino at the little red battalion blocks of the 3rd Mechanized Corps. Eight times, he hid his growing astonishment when the attacks had been repulsed, the red blocks had held, the road to Oboyan remained in Russian control. The reports spoke of flamethrowers and dug-in T-34 positions, of deep echelons of unyielding defenders and close-quarters combat, of dozens of Tigers and Panthers destroying opposing Russian tanks by a score of seven to one throughout the day. Hundreds of Red tanks were wrecked on an afternoon in just one part of the greater battle, and still those Russian blocks held.

On the right-hand side of the SS advance, battle group Kempf was also lagging, staggering far to the south, running behind every schedule and plan. Totenkopf, Das Reich, and Leibstandarte were outpacing their mates, exposing their vulnerable flanks left and right, like a spear stabbing alone through the Russian defenses. Major Grimm could find nowhere to bang his fist, the game board would have been upset, so he pounded the walls. Breit showed no emotion, only a keen raptor’s eye for information.

The entire first day and into the evening, Luis read the messages in a calm voice, supervised the long sticks, and kept his own counsel, absorbing the others’ anger and frustration to feed his own.

On the northern shoulder of the bulge, Colonel General Walter Model achieved nothing to match the penetration into the Soviet defenses by the SS divisions in the south. The lines on Luis’s map in the northern salient resembled more a sag, like a wet ceiling. First, Model was bogged in the town of Ponyri, a blazing battle of tanks and infantry, then he’d been stymied outside the town of Ol’khovalka right at the tip of his advance. The movement of Model’s 11th Army across the big map was globular and slow, not the lightning flash of Blitzkrieg at all. Luis gazed over the little blots of red that held back the unprecedented might of Germany. The reports streaming in to the situation room told the story in bald detail. Model was safeguarding his tanks, keeping them away from the points of attack, using infantry instead to punch through Russian lines, exploiting with his tanks only when there was an opening.

This was not working and could not work - Luis realized this first, hours before Grimm began to bleat about it - not against the immense depths of the Russian defense belts. Infantry on foot were getting chewed up in those thousands of miles of trenches and millions of mines. Tanks, he thought without speaking, watching every flow and recoil of the black blocks in the north. Look at what the SS has done there in the south, look at the pace and ferocity of the assault. The SS uses the bludgeon of the tanks: Mark IVs in the lead in wedge formation, Tigers in the center, this is the Panzerkeil, the armored battering ram. Infantry follows closely, neutralizing the trenches, swarming into the breaches cut by the tanks, holding the gains while the tanks move on. That’s how you cut the Soviets to pieces, that’s how you smash those red blocks into splinters. Tanks, he thought, and the SS. And