‘Yes,’ he muttered, ‘come on…’
Dimitri wanted to reach his hand up and push down the firing lever himself. Christ, boy! he thought, shoot! We’re not measuring them for a new fucking suit, we’re trying to kill them! Shoot!
Valentin’s boot toed the firing pedaclass="underline" The cannon erupted. The report was thunderous, the breech shot back and the smoking casing flipped out, but before it could bounce twice Pasha had the next round in the big gun and Valentin made a small adjustment to the elevation. He toed the pedal again and the tank rocked, another immense bang shook the tank and the breech spit another shell. The compartment stank with the gases but Dimitri had no time to wrinkle his nose, he had to dodge his face away from Valentin’s oncoming boot, the signal to get the General running, and fast.
Dimitri worked the levers and gears to the sound of Pasha and Sasha shouting, ‘Go, go, Dima, come on! Go!’ Bounding away, Valentin traversed the turret around to face front again, for better balance and speed.
‘Well?’ shouted Dimitri. ‘Well?’
Valentin made no answer for a few moments. Dimitri guessed he was turning his periscope back to the Mark IVs, to read the damage while speeding away.
‘Two Mark IVs burning. One smoking. One missed.’
‘What about our tanks?’
‘Medvedenko,’ Valentin said. ‘Disabled. The crew got out.’
Dimitri drove hard, swerving up the hill, but he hadn’t gotten out of second gear yet. His shoulders and arms ached from grappling the levers.
‘What?’ he asked the frowning face of Sasha.
‘We go back. Right? They’re alive.’
Dimitri had been too busy flailing the tank back up the hill to consider this.
‘No,’ answered Valentin over the intercom. ‘We do not go back.’
‘But…’
‘I’m not risking three tanks to rescue four men, Private. They’ll have to fight where they are.’
‘You said so, Dima.’ Sasha addressed Dimitri now. ‘You said a Cossack will die for someone in his clan.’
Dimitri grinned at Sasha, even through his mounting fatigue. The General swung and accelerated up the hill.
‘Yes. I did say that.’
Pasha piped up from his loader’s position. ‘They’re in our clan, Sergeant. They’re tankers, aren’t they?’
‘Yes,’ Dimitri answered before his Soviet son could.
‘And we’re the Cossacks,’ Sasha implored.
We’re the special ones, Sasha was saying. This freckled boy understood.
Dimitri spoke up. His voice shook with the effort in his hands maneuvering the tank. He’d brought them halfway back to their lines.
‘Valya. We vote to go back.’
Valentin spluttered in Dimitri’s earphones. ‘You… you don’t vote! I said no.’
Dimitri whipped the tank to the right, to circle back down the hill.
Sasha held on while the tank jolted, shaking a skinny, childish fist at Dimitri in approval. Dimitri aimed the T-34 down the hill, grabbed the gear knob to shift into third, then froze. The blunt barrel of a pistol appeared beside him, in Valentin’s hand.
Dimitri gazed at the gun. He thought, Well, let’s see if the little shit is man enough to make it stick.
He flung the gearshift into third. The General plunged ahead. Dimitri posted a stupid grin on his face.
‘Yes, Valya, I see it! It’s a lovely pistol, but I don’t think we’re going to need it just yet. Put it away and get your big gun ready!’
The pistol hung in front of Dimitri’s face for another second, then withdrew. Dimitri shook his head in a small, rueful rattle at the shame of this.
The tank lumbered into the air, bounding off the lip of a crater, then crashed down and kept running. Everyone jarred. Dimitri knocked his padded head and wondered if this constant banging of his noggin was going to make him silly one day when he got old. He balled a fist, hollered,
‘Faster, General! ’ and laughed. Death was everywhere, in the Germans’
waiting tanks, in his son’s mean cowardice, in the sky with its stinking Stukas. And Dima Berko was alive in the middle of all of it, shaking his fist and howling.
‘Are the other three still with us?’ Pasha asked.
Dimitri didn’t know. He had to keep his eyes forward to get back down to the river and the barn. Valentin was the squad leader, and General Platov was the lead tank. The others were still under Valya’s orders. They’d be to the rear. Valentin would have to find them through his rotating periscope.
‘Yes,’ Valentin answered. ‘All three.’ Reluctance stained his voice.
Dimitri considered: His son was no coward. No, the boy was a Communist.
Three tanks for three men. Valya was right - it was a rotten risk - and he was so wrong.
Two hundred meters away, smoke curled from both sides of the river.
The burning Mark IVs were in full flaming bloom, their fuel and ammo had been set off. Gray trails billowed from the engine compartment of the third tank but it was rolling. The fourth patrolled back and forth along the riverbank. To the right of the barn, Medvedenko’s T-34 was ruined, its left-hand tread shot off and lying in pieces behind it. The tank smoldered, black smoke boiled out of the open hatches. One of the remaining Mark IVs had put another round into the Red tank to be certain it would not be rescued and repaired later. Dimitri drew closer. At one hundred meters, flinging the General to and fro to keep the German tanks from drawing a bead on him, he saw Medvedenko’s crew, hunkered behind their blazing T-34. Only two men squatted, waving at Dimitri’s onrushing tank. Two others lay on the ground.
‘They’ve got wounded,’ Dimitri called into the intercom.
A burst of small-arms fire from across the river tattooed the glacis plate around his hatch door, tang-ting-tang. Dimitri angled the General to run alongside the bank. His wrists ached, the veins in his forearms were as swollen as the river. At top speed he brought the T-34 between the downed tankers and the river, then shut down his pace, broadside to the still functioning and dangerous twin Mark IVs. In the turret, Valentin was already acquiring a target, mincing in his small circle with the traversing gun. Pasha on his knees raked in his racks for shells. Dimitri shot a glance at Sasha.
‘Go.’
The boy did not hesitate. He reached down between his legs and yanked the handle to the escape hatch. The door lifted and the thin lad slithered out between the treads, then pulled shut the hatch. Close by the General, a report boomed. One of the T-34s in their squad had gotten off the first shot. Dimitri couldn’t see the result. In the blue steppe sky, white scrawls displayed the ferocity of the air battle taking place. Below, for miles running west along the river, every meter of the battlefield bore guns and men exchanging fire, wisps of smoke showed where triggers were pulled, shells struck, lives were taken. Here, almost privately on this small plot of cornfield and river beside a shambled barn, the two Mark IVs and three T-34s defined the war, a rescue and a fight to stop it.