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Konstantin Morozov saw the Centurion crawl out from behind the battered barn about the same time as the tank commander in the English machine spotted his T-54. But his gun pointed right at the Centurion, while the other tank had to traverse its turret ninety degrees to bear on him.
“Armor-piercing!” Morozov screamed. “Range-five hundred! Give it to him!”
Clang! The round slammed into the breech. Blam! “On the way!” Pavel Gryzlov shouted.
“Another!” Morozov commanded. Even as Mogamed Safarli muscled the shell into the breech, the tank commander knew it wouldn’t matter. If the first one hit, the Centurion wouldn’t get a shot off. If it missed, the limeys would smash them before they could fire again.
But Gryzlov knew his business. That first round caught the English tank before its main armament reached the T-54. It slammed through the thinner side armor and hit some of the ammo stowed in the fighting compartment. The Centurion brewed up. Smoke and fire burst from every hatch. Morozov couldn’t imagine how the turret stayed on after a hit like that, but it did. The British built tough machines, even if this one hadn’t been tough enough.
The men inside would hardly have had time to realize they were dead. That was good. Better to go out fast than to cook and know you were cooking. This side of being shot by an outraged husband when he was 104, Konstantin hoped he’d die the same way.
“Good job!” He thumped Gryzlov on the shoulder. “Fucking good job! We’ll paint a fresh ring on the cannon barrel when we get the chance.”
“My dick was on the block, too, Comrade Sergeant,” the gunner said, which was true. The Englishmen wouldn’t have missed. Morozov was sure of that. More Americans fought in western Germany, but the limeys seemed more dangerous. They were professionals, the Yanks brave amateurs still learning their trade.
In aid of which…“Back us up into cover, Yevgeny. Those sons of bitches may have friends up there.”
“I’m doing it,” Yevgeny Ushakov said, and the T-54 moved back toward the little apple orchard from which it had emerged.
“Mogamed, swap out that AP round and load us with HE instead,” Morozov said. “It’ll still hurt a tank, and confuse it-and it’ll tear up infantry.”
“Whatever you say, Comrade Sergeant.” If Mogamed Safarli sounded like a man trying not to show he was irked, that had to be what he was. Those shells were heavy. Taking one out of the breech and slamming in another with your closed fist (to make sure you didn’t snag your thumb in the mechanism) was hard physical labor. Safarli might have loaded the HE round with a little extra oomph to drive the point home.
Morozov sympathized…up to a point. The tank commander had started as a loader himself during the Great Patriotic War. Almost every crewman did. Loader was the slot that needed nothing but a broad back and strong arms. If you happened to have a brain, too, you’d get promoted out of it pretty quick. With the way the Hitlerites chewed up Soviet armor during the last war, there were always plenty of places to fill.
The T-54 stood a better chance against the latest American and British tanks than the T-34/85 had against the Panther and Tiger. But Morozov had fought on a broad front before, where Soviet armor could usually find a weak spot in the Germans’ overextended lines and force a penetration.
Western Germany wasn’t like that. Everything here was compact. If you outflanked some of the imperialists, you just ran into more when you tried to break through. They’d have tanks of their own nearby. Their foot soldiers would have bazookas. A bazooka wouldn’t always kill a T-54, but it had a chance. And the USAF and RAF had rocket-firing fighter-bombers-not quite the same as Shturmoviks, but plenty to pucker your asshole and send your balls crawling up into your belly.
When peering through the periscopes set into the sides of the commander’s cupola didn’t show Konstantin what he needed to see, he put the Zeiss binoculars around his neck and stuck his head out of the cupola for a proper look around. It was the turtle’s problem. As long as he stayed inside his shell, not much could get him, but he didn’t know what was sneaking up to try. He was more vulnerable while he stuck his neck out, but he could see trouble a long way off.
Those fine German field glasses brought the Tommies moving by the dead tank almost close enough to yell at. So it seemed, anyhow. Some of the Englishmen carried rifles, others Sten guns. Neither they nor the Americans had anything like the AK-47. As more of those came into service, the enemy would regret that.
One of the Englishmen-a sergeant, by the stripes clearly visible on his sleeve-pointed in the direction of the T-54. Maybe he could still see it despite Morozov’s pullback. Tanks weren’t exactly inconspicuous. Or maybe he was just showing the direction from which the fatal round had come.
None of the soldiers Morozov could see carried a bazooka tube or wore a sack of rockets on his back. That made them unlikely to come tank-hunting. It wasn’t a cinch-the limeys sometimes did brave, foolhardy things, like any fighting men since the beginning of time. But it did seem to be the way to bet.
He slid back down into the turret. When he reported what he’d seen, Gryzlov asked, “Want me to give them that HE round? I can see ’em pretty well through the magnifying sight.”
After a moment’s thought, Konstantin shook his head. “Not unless they start coming forward. We’ve already made them notice us, and we don’t have a lot of support around here.”
“That’s what we get for being at the tip of the spear,” the gunner said.
“That is what we get, Pasha,” Morozov agreed. “We get it because we’re good. They put us where we can fuck the imperialists the hardest.” And where they can fuck us. That thought followed automatically on the other. But it wasn’t something you said when you were trying to encourage your crew. He went on, “We finally smashed through that shitass Arnsberg place.”
“Not much left of it now, that’s for sure,” Gryzlov said. “But more and more towns and cities ahead, right? This part of Germany’s even more built up and built over than the Soviet zone.”
Now Konstantin nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.” In the USSR, there’d be a city. It would have suburbs around it. Villages and farms and forests and meadows would surround the suburbs for scores if not hundreds of kilometers around. Then you’d come to another city, one that might be hardly acquainted with the place from which you’d set out.
Things here were different. Cities in Germany ran together. You could hardly tell when you got out of one and into the next. This little stretch of farm country was unusual in these parts. Land wasn’t just land. With none to spare, the Fritzes made all of it do something, not sit there waiting for someone to get around to it.
Shturmoviks roared in from out of the east, passing over the orchard so low that their landing gear might have brushed the tops of the taller trees had it been lowered. They shot up and rocketed the English infantry near the knocked-out Centurion. Morozov stuck his head out of the turret again to watch the fun.
Only it turned out not to be all fun. The Tommies had a quick-firing flak gun that knocked down a Shturmovik. The way the planes were armored, that wasn’t easy, but the antiaircraft gun did it. The Shturmovik slammed into the ground behind the English line. A pillar of greasy black smoke marked the pyre of the pilot and rear gunner.
The other planes in the formation flew on. A few minutes later, RAF Typhoons did unto the Red Army as the Shturmoviks had done to the English soldiers. Konstantin dove back inside his tank in a hurry. A couple of bullets clattered off the armor, but that only chipped paint. A hit from a rocket might have been a different story, but none struck. One blew up close enough to shake the T-54, but close didn’t matter. It didn’t if you were a tankman, at any rate. For the poor, damned foot solders, that was a different story, too.