Last Citadel - [World War II 03] (64 page)

He lifted his gaze to the far side of the valley, three kilometers away. The first line of T-34s dove into the sunflowers, leaving a black wake for the next wave, and the next. Luis paid no attention to the number of enemy tanks. They were sufficient, whatever their number, for a grand battle in these sunflowers this morning, minutes from now. The ticking of those eclipsing minutes seemed to come in his hand, his knife hand catching his blood. The beat was the patter of his own blood dribbling, tapping.

Russian T-34s closed from the left, maybe twenty of them remained, running hard. The Reds were paying a flaming wage for getting close enough to enter their own effective range, but in moments their shells would start to take the toll on the stationary SS tanks arrayed across the slope. In the valley, what looked like two regiments of Soviet armor coursed through the sunflower field.

Their lead formations were probably eighteen hundred meters away and charging at top overland speed.

We don’t have time to sit on this slope, he thought. We can’t stay still and take potshots, we’ll be up to our asses in Red tanks. They’ll slam into us, we’ll have no room to maneuver, with T-34s on three sides. And we will not go backward.

He watched the Red tanks crush the gold on their side of the valley, pushing into it fast, killing the color. They wore broken yellow petals and severed brown irises across their fenders in ugly spangles. This stoked something in Luis, the last bit of him, bleeding, maddened, hungry all of a sudden, blazing into hatred.

‘Radio.’

‘Ja.’

‘Tell the company to follow. Driver, forward.
Mack schnell
.’

Luis stood in the turret while the Tiger, his company, and then the entire regiment followed his command. Luis felt bold; the wound throbbed in his jaw but it was his throb, there was nothing foreign, no infestation of others in his soul now. He felt the black wooden block of the faraway map room slide forward, slide into this yellow valley that he knew was drawn blue and white on the giant map. He sensed the red blocks sliding to meet him across the table. But there were no long poles pushing them at each other. No, it was Luis making this happen. Let Breit and Grimm and Hitler and the Americans and the world watch Luis Ruiz de Vega go forward, and know that all of them, everything, were impelled by his will alone.

Slowly, then faster, the sixty-seven tanks of
Leibstandarte
gave up the ridge and lowered to the valley floor. The Soviet tanks merged into the field with the Germans. The battleground was level and bright, for these first moments a clean slate of gold.

Luis rode high on the Tiger. He watched the picket of sunflowers approach and succumb beneath his tank. He heard the crunch of snapping stalks and ignored it. He cared nothing for the field. It was land to be taken. They were Russian sunflowers. Not Spanish. Not gold.

* * * *

CHAPTER 29

July 12

0909 hours

sunflower field

3 kilometers west of Prokhorovka

Dimitri could stand no more blindness, ramming his way through the green and saffron fatness of the sunflowers. He tore forward in the center of a great cavalry charge, into an enemy he had not caught sight of. Only Valentin in his turret could see where this Soviet attack was going, Dimitri could only tell how fast. Beside him, Sasha peered into his own vision block, blotted out by the same crashing field. The full-out sprint inside the
General
had turned claustrophobic, it was down to shuddering metal painted mint green, glass dials, levers, pedals, jiggling ammunition, diesel stink, unseeing men inside speeding steel. Who makes war like this, Dimitri marveled, who in the world? Only us, Russia. Always numbers, blindfolded numbers.

Dimitri had been catapulted into this valley like a lifeless cannonball, not a man entering battle, and he would have no more of it. Without an order from Valya, he angled the
General
to the right, easing sideways until he found the wake of another T-34 racing twenty meters ahead. He laid his own spinning treads into the tracks of that tank and followed, to see better where he was going. Valentin’s boots did not prevent him.

Dimitri blinked into his periscope. The tank ahead boosted flowers and fumes into the air, but for the first time in the attack he could see beyond his own fenders. The opposite slope of the valley dodged in and out of view. His visor shook with the jangling pace. In the glimpses he got of the far side, he noted tread scratches and shell craters in the brush and grasses there. Lots of German tanks had sat on that slope a minute before. How many? Several dozens, fifty at least, their marks covered the whole ridge. There’d been a short firefight. Perhaps the SS had withdrawn in the face of the Red onslaught, maybe they’ve gone back over the ledge in retreat. That’s why we’re hauling so fast, he thought. To catch the Germans. Maybe we won’t have to fight in this yellow hell.

His answer came in a trumpeting clout against his tank’s momentum, the sound like a lightning slash through the
General’s
cabin. His head and shoulders jolted to the impact, back into Valentin’s boots, he bit into his lip, his goggles were knocked askew. Both steering rods snapped out of his grip. The
General
careened. Smoke shot in around his hatch.

‘Papa!’ Valya’s scream was small in the turmoil.

Dimitri felt turned upside down, he could not stop blinking and gaping. Sasha was frantically trying to corral the free-flopping levers. Dimitri grabbed the boy by the scruff of his coveralls and flung him back into his own seat. He surrounded the levers with fists and gathered them in, grunting with the dizzy effort.

‘What happened?’ Pasha had been shouting this the whole time, Dimitri realized. ‘Are we hit? What happened?’

‘The shell deflected,’ Valentin answered. ‘It deflected. We’re alright. Everyone, lock in. Calm down. Papa?’

The round must have hit the slanted glacis plate right in front of Dimitri’s head. The armor held; the tread links the mechanic welded there had probably saved all their lives. Dimitri worked his tongue over his cut lip, the dash of pain yanked him alert. He regained control of the reeling tank.

‘Papa.’

‘What?’

‘They’re in the field with us.’

The tank’s ventilation system dragged at the strata of smoke between them. Sasha trained bugging eyes on Dimitri, then thrust them into his vision block. He put his hands on his machine-gun. The boy coughed and muttered, ‘Son of a bitch.’

Dimitri righted his goggles and muscled the tank forward, straight and fast as before. He waited for Valentin to give the order to stop, to train their big gun on whoever was shooting at them. But Valya kept the
General
charging ahead. Dimitri leaned in to his visor; he’d lost sight of the tanks ahead of him; after the blow the
General
must have spun out of formation. He was blind again, bolting through sunflowers.

Why are the Germans down in the valley with us? he wondered. They never do this, they don’t give up the advantage of their cannons. They’ve got discipline, they sit outside our range and pummel us, make us run under their stronger guns for a thousand meters before we can even squeeze off the first round. By the time we get close enough to hurt them, we’re slaughtered. Why are they in these damned flowers with us and not up on that ledge? Something is making them hasty. Something’s happened to their timetable.

Christ, Dimitri thought, Christ. This isn’t how tanks fight. How close are we going to get?

Again, as it had done moments before, the battle answered his question.

In his visor, the stalks ceased beating themselves against his sprinting tank, just for a second, then returned to their density. Moments later, they ceased again. The
General
rolled through gaps in the field.

Dimitri dropped his jaw to this new and worse shock.

No.

Those weren’t gaps.

In this instant, Valya’s boots struck him hard between the shoulders.
Stop
.

Dimitri’s heart clutched. He flung the
General
into lower gears, pressing with every bit of his strength on the brake.

Those were tank tracks, he realized. German tank tracks.

We’re side by side in the sunflower field. We’ve crossed paths. Over two hundred tanks.

My God.

Sasha mumbled, ‘Son of a…’

* * * *

0913 hours

Many of the commanders in his regiment had lowered their hatches and secured themselves in for combat. Luis stood in the astounding morning. This was far too grand a sight to view through an eyepiece, locked inside a great, rumbling can, he thought. No, he’d leave the hatch cover up and let Thoma look with him. He lifted his wounded chin, still cupped in a pressing palm, to take it all in.

‘What do you think?’ he asked Thoma.

On every side of the great bowl of sunflowers, purple smoke drifted in kilometer-wide sheets. From Petrovka on the river, from Lutovo and Iamki south of the rail mound, the forest around Storozhevoe, across the river at Polezhaev, the air itself seemed to bleed. Russian and German forces vying for this little alleyway to Prokhorovka rammed into each other in unthinkable numbers. If all across the corridor the Russians insisted on the same two-to-one advantage they’d poured into this sunflower field, they’d marshaled five hundred Red tanks against the two hundred and thirty the SS’d brought, and every one of them, Red and German, shoe-horned into such a small arena! The smoke signals were everywhere! So must be the tanks.

Luis wanted to exult at the Russian charge. He wanted to shout, Come on! at the Reds, but he bit the bellow back, it imploded in his chest and fed his temper. The cut in his chin stung from sweat. He switched palms clapped against it, bloodying both hands.

In the valley now, his Tiger had fired no shots into the host of Russian tanks swarming and spreading his way. Luis held Balthasar in check for the first moments when it became plain the Soviets were not going to stop short and duel from their side of the sunflowers. He marveled at the charging Russians, watched the swaying yellow expanse between the Reds and his Tiger grow narrower by the second. Across a broad front, a hundred and more T-34s came nose-to-nose with the first ranks of
Leibstandarte’s
sixty-seven. The Reds ran so much faster than the German tanks, it was awesome to see at point-blank range. Not many rounds were exchanged in these initial seconds when the two forces mingled their armor. There was too much momentum, none dared to stop and take aim. Then the Russians ran right past
Leibstandarte’s
leading tanks, incredible! The two armies were like ghosts, passing into and through each other, a dreadful and unprecedented thing to see. Once contact was made, the ghosts slowed and stared at each other, both furious and invaded. Turrets whined now, treads squeaked to a halt, brakes and gears howled; to Luis the squealing sounds recalled the abattoir, screaming cattle, butchery, also the private whimpers of pain the bull makes, heard only by those close enough in the ring, the ones hurting him.

A hundred tanks of both sides came to a halt and fired their opening volleys. Many were broadside, aimed at enemies only-thirty, forty meters away. The toll in the initial minutes was vicious: cannons rang, gunsmoke spit, tanks erupted into flames. A haze enfolded the valley. A hundred other tanks kept moving, slicing through the flowers, dashing across crushed paths where Red or German tanks had just been a moment before. Luis watched a smoking T-34 tear past him through the flowers. He had no strategy to deal with this. He pressed his driver to continue forward, wading into the valley with his company wavering around him. He ordered them to stay close-knit but instantly saw how impossible that would be in this melee. One by one his Mark IVs peeled out of formation, engaged with one or several Soviet tanks at knife-fighting distance. Luis let them go.

Balthasar asked for firing instructions.

Luis made no response, just rode the Tiger deeper into the clanging flower field. A burning piece of a plane plummeted through the thickening battle fog; the battle for Prokhorovka was a tall thing, too, a giant rearing into the clouds.