Last Citadel

What Dimitri saw across the plain below Hill 260.8 throttled his heart.

Tanks. A hundred of them, in a line as far east and west as he could see to the limits of his open hatch, tanks like a poisoned vein, venom in the earth.

They had to stretch from Verkhopenye to Sokho-Solotino, a ten-kilometer swath on either side of the Oboyan road, with Dimitri smack in the middle.

The Stukas overhead now had the Sturmoviks to contend with. The ground attack was the real hammer blow of the German battering ram to snatch the road. This was tank against tank.

Valya’s boot touched his neck. Stop. Dimitri downshifted and dug the tank in. Without the clatter of the treads to obscure it he heard the deepness of the day’s battle, the booms and lashes of artillery and cannons, the pops of small-arms fire, the rip of airplane engines and guns overhead, and tanks dashing past, forming up into their units to confront the German battle group rumbling and smoking, kicking dust and closing across the grassland from the south. Dimitri waited while Valya waved flags to his ragtag platoon. Another plane crashed down, evicted out of the melee in the air. Beside Dimitri, Sasha fingered his trigger. On the cusp of standing on the fuel pedal and plunging ahead, Dimitri rummaged inside himself, for sorrow, or humility, or regret at how he’d handled his life, something benevolent to please God with what might turn out to be his last worldly thoughts, but he found none of it, nothing good to drape about him before facing today’s certain death. He stared straight ahead into the plain and turned up nothing but the exhilaration of war. I tried, he told himself, and told God, too, should God be listening, and took the levers.

Valya clanged shut his hatch. The General idled on the steppe, other tanks moved beside it. The Germans weren’t near enough yet to trade shots. Dimitri thought, Why wait? Valentin read his mind and toed the top of Dimitri’s head.

Go.

* * * *

July

at the foot of Hill 260.8

0750 hours

the Oboyan road

Dimitri descended into the battle. It took its shape around him, like a current flowing past a prow. The immense noise and shuddering vibrations faded to a fizz in his ears. His feet on the pedals and his fists on the levers ruddered the tank through the flow of fires and howl. Pasha and Sasha faded, too, they moved like dipping oars, propelling the General into the waves of combat. Dimitri did not notice the ruin and din the way a sailor does not focus on the water, his eye is to the wind that drives him. Valya was that wind. The boy issued orders with voice and tapping feet, he lit up the morning with bonfires that were enemies, he started and halted the tank, rocked it with the cannon and recoil, every move was commanded by him.

Valentin fought the battle, and Dimitri fought only the tank. There was peace in this, peace in the midst of horror. Dimitri left his hatch door open, to see as much of the field as he could. He exposed himself to exploding shrapnel, to a million zinging bullets, but there was nothing left to him in the world, he had no clan, he was no one’s hetman. The day was enormous, bigger and more tumultuous than anything he’d ever experienced.

The German tanks rolled over the advance trenches of the third and final defense belt etched across the Oboyan road. The Red soldiers of the 3051th Rifle Division held their ground against the charge of metal but by 1000 hours the tanks sliced through them and the German grenadiers followed, falling into the defense works, cauterizing them in close-quarters fighting. Dimitri saw the blasts of grenades, bodies flung on the black concussions; arms rose and fell with bayonets and trenching tools. German bravery poured itself over Russian bravery and together they boiled in the pits dug by Just Sonya and her thousand civilians. The unsheathed men of both armies mangled one another. The German tanks rumbled past their skirmish, spraying defenders with machine-gun fire and point-blank cannon until they had punched through the defense line. In a clanking, jagged line, buttoned tight and spewing shells and smoke, they treaded up the elevated ground that lay before Hill 260.8 and the Oboyan road and Dimitri.

The field that separated the T-34s from the German tanks was five kilometers deep and fifteen kilometers wide. The land was even and colored by smashed grasses, with no trees or streams to break the table.

The slope up to Dimitri’s position was gentle and his view of the enemy tanks was unhindered, despite the battle haze, the fumes and spittle of fighting and dying machines. A medley of German tanks clattered forward.

Dimitri spotted mostly boxy Mark IVs coming in wedge formations. A handful of feeble Mark IIIs bounced over the ruts like runt schoolkids desperate to keep up. He swept his gaze over the German advance, no fewer than fifty tanks spread before him. He wondered how many he did not see. The leviathans in their pack could not be hidden. Tigers.

‘AP!’ hollered Valya. Pasha slammed a shell into the breech. The General’s interior stank with sulphur backwash. A boot on Dimitri’s cap brought the tank to a halt. The turret whined to the right. Dimitri sat on the shuddering idle, downshifting to first, keeping the clutch depressed, his hands on the levers to leap ahead the instant the shell was gone. Valentin toed the firing pedal and the General shook. Without an order, Dimitri bolted ahead, going nowhere, but moving: A still tank on a battlefield is a fatal thing.

The roiled ground fountained in the cannon blast, Valentin did not ask Dimitri to wait until he could confirm a hit through the dust and grass, they just kept moving.

The Germans stayed back, they came no closer than a thousand meters. Some tank from either side would bolt ahead into the seven-, even six-hundred-meter range, not careful where his comrades were. He’d get off a shot or two and more often than not die right there, becoming a sort of fiery pylon demarking the ravaged boundaries between the forces. Valentin lost control of his tank squadron early, this was a free-for-all. He picked solitary targets across the distance of the field, using the small advantage of the elevation provided by the landscape, and was in turn picked by enemies. He shouted every order to Pasha, and only spoke to Dimitri when he had the turret rotated far enough to pull his feet from his father’s shoulders. Sasha fired at streaking Stukas when he could, but as yet there were no German infantry in range. The duels were impromptu across the field, gunner against gunner. This was tank battle in open land.

Dimitri ran wicked patterns across the field. He ducked in and out of the other T-34s, getting Valya the best flank shots he could while making himself hard to hit. He even went so far as to speed behind other idling Red tanks who were sitting still for moments to finalize their own targets, to scrape off the attention of any German commander who might be following the General in his periscope. Twice the General was struck, both glancing shots off the sloped armor that did not explode but struck like a bell clapper, dulling every ear inside for a minute. The crew stayed alive because Valentin was remarkably fast with his marksmanship, Pasha showed the determination of a machine, and Dimitri flogged the tank in and out of gears with the hands of a tillerman and a hard rider, lurching and careering, reversing just to be random and maddening.

He spun through a field increasingly clotted with burning T-34s.

Twenty or more tanks smoldered in varying stages of destruction, some wrecked and dismembered, some