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Broken Jewel The Betrayal Game The Assassins Gallery Liberation Road Last Citadel Scorched
Earth The End of War War of the Rats Souls to Keep |
CHAPTER 1 June 28, 1943 Dimitri Konstantinovich Berko laughed and could not hear himself. He bumped his head hard but his padded helmet softened the jolt. He straightened his goggles over his eyes and licked dusty sweat. The metal around him humped and bucked and because it was Dimitri making all this happen he laughed more and whooped. He rammed his left boot down on the clutch and in the same instant mashed the brake with his right. The tank ground to a halt. Dimitri hauled the gearshift into reverse; the gears of the new tank fought him only for a grinding second, confused by the speed of his hands and feet, then meshed. He stepped on the gas and popped his foot off the clutch. The tank around him jumped and came down, the tracks spun fast and scooped further into the dirt. Dimitri hit the brake and clutch again, shifting to neutral. Whorls of dust, the black spume of the steppe, spilled into the open driver's hatch, riding on the June sun. He let the tank idle for a few seconds, hoping to hear screams from the men beneath the tank, but the engine growled out any sound but its own. This is the way of the tank, Dimitri thought. You hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing, but the tank. You have to imagine the rest. Oh well, he thought, I'll keep having fun even without the screams. Looking out through the hatch, he saw the whole company gathered to watch his antics, the way Dimitri could make a tank shudder and dance, spin, and even run in place to dig its way down into a trench. They should see me on a horse, Dimitri thought. This tank, this machine, is nothing next to an old Cossack on a horse. He shifted into gear, hit the gas and let the clutch fly again. The tank bolted, its treads scoured the ground. Dimitri nodded; this T-34 fresh from the factory had some fire in its belly. Good! He felt the chassis drop again towards the men in the narrow trench while dust thickened the air inside the tank. He pulled his hands off the twin steering rods. Rearing his goggled head out of the hatch, he raised both arms in the air and shook his fists for the crowd. I am the best driver! I am the Cossack of the tanks! He did not hear the men's shouts but saw them raise their arms in reply, Yes, you are! While he waved his fists in the air, several men broke ranks from the crowd and ran to the tank. They dove through the dust cloud into the trench. Dimitri leaned over to see just how far he'd scraped down to the 6th Guards infantry trainees who'd hunkered under his bouncing T-34. Good, he thought. Almost all the way down to the undercarriage. That must have put some shit in a few britches down there, watching the bottom of a thirty-ton tank bore its way down on you. That was the point, wasn't it? This was an exercise to help these peasant boys get rid of their fear of tanks. A job well done, then, Dimitri told himself. He lowered himself through the hatch into his driver's seat. He gunned the engine and pulled the T-34 off the trench. The diesel engine spit black fumes onto the trainees in the trench and doused those do-gooders helping their shaking comrades. Dimitri yanked back on the left steering lever and shoved on the right, spinning the tank in a tight circle to the right, gouging out one last billow of dust. He shut the tank down. He climbed onto the glacis plate and slid to the ground. Six soldiers staggered out of the trench, three helping another three whose legs were jellied. Those who could muster angry stares shot them at Dimitri, but like the tank his armor was sufficient to glance them away. With his soft helmet and goggles pulled from his head, he could now hear the cheers. Dimitri ran a hand through his gray, close cropped hair. He waved and bowed. When he straightened, he watched a sergeant stomp over to him. The dust seemed to settle faster under this one's angry boots, getting out of his way. This was the commander of Dimitri's tank. The sergeant came very close. He was neat and good looking, wearing the Russian tankers' slate gray coveralls like Dimitri, except his weren't so sweaty and smirched. He was built like Dimitri, a bit long for a tanker, not so squat and thick to fit inside these cans of war. He was no peasant. "Private. What do you think you were doing?" Dimitri was calm. The man was much younger than him. All of the men were. The crowd went quiet. "What I was ordered to do, comrade sergeant." The sergeant worked his jaw, careful with Dimitri but resolute to show displeasure. Dimitri spoke first. "A lot of these men have never been in combat. You and I have, sergeant. What did you want me to do, be nice to them?" The sergeant's eyes cut away. Dimitri followed where he looked. A colonel stood in the crowd of men, hands on his hips, unhappy. The officer was obviously from 3rd Mechanized Brigade headquarters, come to watch the progress of the anti-tank training. The men were supposed to wait in the trench for Dimitri's tank to roll past, them jump out behind the T-34 and clap magnetic mines on the rear above the tank's engine and air filtration systems. What the colonel saw instead was a tank driver thwarting the training for some amusement and torment. The sergeant brought his gaze back around to Dimitri. Bugs buzzed in the tall steppe grasses. Other tanks on other training areas growled in their own exercises. Dimitri lowered his voice below the insects and engines, so only the sergeant could hear. "Who is that?" The sergeant kept his voice low as well. "It's Babadzhanian." Dimitri grimaced. This was the commander of their 16th Regiment. "Oooo." "Yes." Dimitri looked down to think, but also to look sorry. "Slap me." The sergeant drew up at this. "I will not." "I was insolent. Slap me now." "No. It's against regulations." "And if you don't, I'm headed for the stockade. Come on, boy, show some balls and save your papa a week behind bars. I hate their food." The sergeant, Valentin Dimitriyevich Berko, held still. "No." "Your mother was a whore." "I know." "I should have drowned you at birth." "I know." "Then slap me." Dimitri shuffled his heels in the torn-up earth. This was taking too long. Many more seconds and the colonel himself would stride forward to mete out regimental justice, and Dimitri was no fan of the idea. He gritted his teeth. "Alright, Valya. What will it take?" "Your promise." "What, to be good?" "Yes." Dimitri hesitated. "For how long?" Both father and son saw the colonel take a step into the ring of quiet men. "Alright." Valentin's hand lashed across Dimitri's face, turning his head. A good shot, he thought over the burn in his cheek. "Private!" his son shouted. Dimitri caught a glimpse of the colonel. The officer held his ground. Valentin laid it on. "The men in that trench are your comrades. The Red Army has no place in it for behavior like what you just displayed! You will apologize to these men and you will in future conduct yourself according to the rules set out in the training manual. Or I will personally see you to the stockade myself! Is this understood?" Dimitri stiffened. "Yes, comrade sergeant! Deeply understood!" Everyone in the company who knew Dimitri knew this was more of his clowning, but they also understood no one had better laugh in front of the colonel, or Dimitri would not be so funny later. Valentin pointed at the T-34. "Now get back in your tank. You will do another shift and you will perform your duties without flaw. Or there will be consequences. Move, private!" Dimitri ran the several steps to the tank. The green-painted metal was warm under the summer sun, filthy with flung dirt. With practiced ease and agility beyond his fifty-five years, he lifted himself and swung his legs through the hatch, settling into his seat. With swift hands he flicked the ignition switch on and hit the starter. The diesel engine coughed and fired. Dimitri pulled down his goggles and took hold of the twin levers. This was the third tank he and Valya had been given. In the last year they'd had two shot out from under them, one in the pocket outside Stalingrad in the winter, one more in the lost battle for Khar'kov three months ago. With their tanks went two crews; twice he and his son have been the only ones to escape. Four dead, all the hull machine gunners and loaders. And when you die inside a tank, you always die ugly. Dimitri looked around the compact room of the T-34, designed for battle, not comfort. Metal everywhere, and where there was not steel there were glass gauges. When the armor gets pierced by a shell, the compartment turns into a razor storm, a pit of flame, a gas chamber, any number of things that will kill you faster than a blink. Dimitri permitted himself a wistful second, recalling what he had seen inside these tanks. When will the string run out for him? And Valya? It'll happen, he thought, somewhere on the road ahead. It's always been there. So why worry? Dimitri laughed at this. He wanted a saber in his hand and a strong horse between his legs, to gallop off down that road ahead, to find what waited for him there and call it to a challenge. But he had no horse, a Cossack without a steed or a blade. Instead he gunned the engine of the tank the Red Army gave him to ride, he looked up at the long barrel of the gun his son was given to fire, and for now these were good enough. Valentin's head appeared in his hatch. "Papa." "Yes, I know." "Alright." Dimitri mounted a grin. "Valya." "What." "Next time, don't smack me so hard." Valentin drooped his eyes and shook his head. The boy is always amazed at me, thought Dimitri. This is a failure of mine as a father. Dimitri sprung the catch on the driver's hatch and let it fall shut with a clang. He charged the gearshift forward, let go the clutch and the tank sprang ahead. He couldn't see, but he knew his son had to leap clear fast. * * * June 28 Dimitri rumbled the tank away from the training field to a clearing. He was filthy with dust and perspiration. Valentin kept him going back and forth over the trenches until the new tank was almost out of gas. He eased above the trainees in the ditch, even braked for them to catch up to him and lay their wooden disks, the fake mines, over his ventilation system. Valentin stood always in his vision, signaling him to turn and do it again. In his gritty cabin, Dimitri cursed the boy. The tank, one of the new T-34/76 1942's, responded well. The designers had added only a few improvements over the 1940 and 1941 models. The treads were slightly broader, reducing the ground pressure per square inch, letting the tank handle better. There was added armor on the turret face and sides. The hull gunner's position had a protected mount now. The turret overhang was reduced to keep from reflecting incoming rounds down onto the turret ring. The big difference was the longer barreled main gun for a higher muzzle velocity. Shells fired from this tank would penetrate far better than anything the Red Army had ever mounted. But it still might not be enough. Dimitri heard talk of the new German super tanks, Tigers, Panthers and Elephants, with massive guns and the thickest armor ever seen on the battlefield. When the fighting starts again, these new beasts will be arrayed across the steppe from him. Again, he laughed at his own worries, and once Valentin let him off duty, he parked his own new beast under a tree. In the shade, he stood from his seat, tossing helmet and goggles to the grass. He slid down the glacis plate and stood stretching his back and stiff neck. He looked out over this land the Germans and Russians decided would be the stage for their apocalypse. Eternal swaths of reeds and grasses rolled in ripples of green and wheat. Easy hills and shallow hollows as far as Dimitri could see were broken only by sparse copses of trees and brush. Few villages and streams spoiled the expanse. This was beautiful cavalry country, classic campaign terrain, where giants could fit all their wares at once and surge at one another, to clash eye to eye. Dimitri gazed south. Twenty miles from here the Germans have gathered, reports say with more land and air force than at any other time in the war. A hundred miles north they've done the same. Any time now, they'll attack from two directions towards the center, aimed at the city of Kursk, to pinch and surround the millions of Russians defending in the pocket. Leading up from the south, there's just one road to Kursk. It cuts through the town of Oboyan ten miles at his back. Dimitri, his son, and their 3rd Mechanized Corps, straddled this road. Three major defense belts have been dug into the earth between Oboyan and the Germans. The Red Army has put everything it can muster in front of Oboyan, including Dimitri. If the Germans take this road, if Dimitri is alive to see them sweep north past him, he will be alive to see the battle lost. Dimitri yawned. He turned away from the coming battleground and crawled between the tracks of the T-34. The gut of the tank was caked with soil where he'd laid it down over the trench. He kicked off dangling clogs to make room. The cooling aluminum engine pinged. Dimitri patted the tank's underbelly, then curled over on his shoulder and fell asleep. Hours later, when he slid from beneath the tank, he was stiff, his body cranky. "Alright, my lad," he said, standing. A grunt slipped through his teeth. He'd taken shrapnel in his right calf six months ago outside Stalingrad and never had it removed. Over his half century of fighting and carousing and galloping, he'd fallen off fifty horses and been kicked by a hundred. He'd pulled plows when the mules were starved in the collectivization years in the Kuban. His knuckles were scarred and knobby from farm machines, swords, jaws, guns and now tanks. Dimitri opened his hands in front of him, then worked them into fists. His forearms bulged no less than they did thirty years ago when he was a rider for the Tsar. Now his nails were stained with grease and not the loam of the farm or the lather of a war charger. He opened one thick hand and laid it across the tanks's fender. He walked all around the tank, touching it, gracing the sloped armor. He reached up to the thick turret, cooler now for its time beneath the trees. He slid his fingers down the long green length of the main gun, at its open mouth remembering sugar cubes and carrots, knowing he must ride this beast towards death and having nothing in his pockets to give the machine to please it and bond it to him. "Well, before we do anything else," he said, speaking to the tank from the front, "you need your name. Yes." Dimitri walked not far to another tank crew and got from them a brush and a canister of white paint. Walking back he read the titles given to several other of the newly supplied T-34s: Motherland; Our Nation's Defense; Stalin The Father; and so on. The commissars loved it when you dubbed your tank something like that. Dimitri would not sloganeer for the communists. He was the driver. The tank was his to name. He returned to his clearing and climbed aboard. In minutes, on the port side of the turret, he scrawled in large letters the name of his other two tanks, General Platov, the great Cossack warrior from the fight with Napoleon. "Now, General," he said in a soothing tone, "let's see what you've got." From his two T-34s and over a year of fighting, Dimitri had assembled a box of tools he kept strapped to the hulls. With every tank he abandoned, it was the last thing he scrabbled for before running for cover. He opened it now and took out a wrench. At the rear of the tank, he unfastened the hatch. The first thing in the compartment was the transmission. The makers of the T-34 were clever fellows. They knew the transmission in their tank was garbage, so they put it right where you could get to it easily, chuck a bad one away and shove in another. This location in the back had one drawback for the driver: it made the tank's gears tough to shift because of the long drive train running through the floor. Dimitri and the other Russian tank drivers learned to keep a hammer under their seats for the more stubborn moments of the T-34's transmission. The next item in the rear compartment was the twelve-cylinder engine. It too was easy to dispose of and replace. Battlefield repairs of Russian tanks were often expedient affairs because of this design. Also, spare parts were plentiful during action, a sad and smoking, sometimes burning, vista, but convenient for a buzzard mechanic like Dimitri. He had to hand this to Stalin: while the Germans littered the land with several makes of tank - and from the rumors were about to add two more, larger models - Stalin announced he would shoot any factory manager producing anything but his T-34. A thousand were pumped out every month in the Urals, to replace the thousand left charred on the steppe or snow or rubbled city streets. Stalin was also pursuing a new, heavier tank design, the KV-1, but these had not yet made any impression in battle, and as far as Dimitri knew there were none in the Kursk salient. The main battle tank for the Red Army was the T-34. Independent of whether they were good machines or not, it was the Russian way to fight a war, with numbers, massed waves of men and materiel. Lenin himself said it: Quantity is its own quality. Today, the problem facing the Russians was not with the amount of tanks available; every week there grew fewer and fewer trained men left to fight in them. Dimitri dug his head into the engine compartment, looking over the heart of his new tank. And it was a good heart. The T-34's motor made it the fastest tank on the field, always, with a top speed of 30 miles per hour. The engine was diesel, efficient, giving the tank a range of up to 260 miles. The motor also lacked the troubling tendency to blow up in combat, like the Germans' gasoline powered Mark III and IV tanks. Dimitri poked around a while with his wrenches, checking bolts and hose couplings, filters and fittings. He talked to the machine, gentling it, getting it accustomed to its new name, General, and the feel of his hands on its secrets. The designers had three elements to balance when devising this tank: speed, protection and power. Too much armor slows down speed, too much speed sacrifices the weight needed to carry a big gun and ammo. The T-34 was as good a compromise as any Dimitri had seen on the battlefields. And even when they were killed by the hundreds, more kept coming. The Russian way. Satisfied, he pushed himself out of the engine compartment. He bolted the rear panel tight and laid his tools in the metal case above the fender. "Another General Platov." Dimitri did not turn around to his son's voice. Instead, he finished his chore. "Maybe this time the good General will have better luck. How many lives does a Cossack have, papa?" Dimitri crouched to wipe his grimy hands on the grass. "As many as he needs." Valentin stayed quiet for uncomfortable seconds. Then he spoke. "It's a bad thing when a son has to slap his father." Dimitri kept his eyes away from Valentin. The boy stood for more seconds, the time mounted between them like something coming out of the ground. Valentin retreated before it, to climb up on the tank. He lifted himself into the commander's hatch and stood. The T-34's large hatch cover was fashioned to hinge towards the front, making the commander stand behind it. It was done this way to protect the commander during combat from ahead, but in the end it was simply cumbersome, difficult to see around and the cause of many bloody noses during sudden stops. But Valentin looked good in the commander's spot, peering down at Dimitri kneeling in the grass. He had a Cossack nose, sharp and long like a sword, a square jaw and the blue eyes of the steppe sky, the ancient canopy for the Kuban and Don horsemen. Dimitri had passed to his son his own wiry build and black hair. But the boy did not always keep his head up, and Dimitri lamented that he had given Valentin a Cossack's body but not his soul. Dimitri rose and stepped back from the General, to let the boy have it to himself for a while, it was new to him too. Valentin's head disappeared into the tank, the hatch banged shut above him. In seconds the tank came alive. The periscope in the commander's hatch began to rotate. Then Valentin worked the manual crank to elevate the main gun. The long barrel lifted to its full height, 30 degrees, then drooped to its lowest elevation, minus 3 degrees. This was another of the design concessions of the T-34. The turret's low profile made it a hard target, but the closeness of the gun mantlet to the chassis made it impossible to depress the main gun very far. This restricted the gunner's ability to fire at close targets, or to level the barrel when the tank sat behind a protective berm with the nose tilted up. So many compromises, Dimitri thought, so much left undone in the making of a tank, a son. Dimitri watched the tank, silent and motionless now, wrapped around his boy. Together he and Valya had fought and killed, escaped and spit smoke and blood. Dimitri did not know how many German tanks they'd faced in the war, hundreds certainly. He had no count of how many they'd beaten. Enough to still be standing here, whatever the number. Valentin in combat was an excellent gunner, his marksmanship with the 76 mm. main gun was as good as any tanker. But as a commander, when the bold time came, that moment in every battle when you chose life or death and left it to God to decide, the boy could hesitate. He waited for instructions, held in check by the communists who fight sometimes as if they're afraid to go in alone, so instead they die in ten thousands. These times Dimitri took over, he turned the tank towards God and the Germans and told the boys over the intercom to keep shooting. The others in their crews, the ones dead now, thought he was crazy. He wasn't, ever. He was a Cossack. And so Valentin Dimitriyevitch Berko, commander of the tank named General Platov, has become a squadron leader, and one to follow in battle. The commander's hatch lifted with a creak. I'll need to grease that, thought Dimitri. I'll need to groom the whole damn thing, and then some German will shoot it out from under me again. Valentin hoisted himself out of the hatch, dropping on young legs to the ground. Valya nodded at Dimitri. "Good," he said. "I think so," Dimitri agreed. Valentin stuck his tongue inside his lip. He looked at his boots. "I'm sorry I'm such a disappointment to you." Dimitri glared at the top of his son's head, as though with a fist in the boy's hair, to yank Valya's eyes up from the ground. "You're soft," he said. "I follow orders." "You follow communists." "Stalin's winning the war." Dimitri strode close to his son. He held out one veined forearm. He pointed at the blue tracks marbling the muscle. "You see this? This is what's winning the war. Russian blood. Not Stalin, not Lenin. Me. You." He pounded a fist hard on the tank. "We fight, in this!" Valentin worked his jaw. Dimitri wanted to bait him into an argument. "You know what the word Cossack means? It's Turkish, from kazak. It means..." "Freedom, papa, it means freedom. We've had this discussion." "And I want to have it again." Valentin backed off. "I'm not going to fight with you." No, thought Dimitri, it seems he's not. The son, born under the reign of Lenin, turned his back on his father, born under Tsar Alexander III. He took several steps with Dimitri glaring at his back. "When will we get our new crew?" Dimitri asked, his tone metered, as if he were a private asking his sergeant. Valya stopped. He did not turn or raise his head. Face me, thought Dimitri, get your fucking head up. "I'm told in a few days." "Well, if you've been told, I'm sure that's what will happen." Dimitri didn't mean for the sarcasm to get loose like that, but there it was. Valentin turned. The boy's jaw was set. Dimitri nodded at this. "My mother was a saint." Natalya. Dead. Starved by Stalin fifteen years ago in the Ukraine with ten million others. There she was, in Valentin's lean Cossack face, just for this moment, defending herself on his lips. Dima, Dima, you bastard! she shouted at him a thousand times; Dima, you fool, she laughed a thousand more. "Yes, she was." Valya nodded back and for these seconds over the battleground of the mother and wife they stood equal. Then she was eclipsed by the boy's own spirit and his eyes hung again. Valya put his hands in his pockets. "Leave me alone," Dimitri said, "and let me get this tank ready." Valentin walked from beneath the tree into the hip-high grass, following the tank tracks crushed there by his father. |
David
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