The two forces closed.
Now it was tank on tank, almost like a naval battle as the vessels of each side maneuvered at speed for positional leverage, angle to unarmored vitals, accuracy, and firing speed, kicking up dust, spraying debris and mud as they adjusted. It had Trafalgar or Jutland or the Armada entwined through it. The smaller Russian vehicles juked, switched attack angles radically, feinted, and jitterbugged, looking for that elusive sideways angle into the slower, bigger vehicles, which, though not as maneuverable, had more able gunners and seldom missed a shot.
She was in a cauldron of blast heat and concussion, wondering how on earth she could get a clean shot off. At that point her own vehicle came to a halt, almost spilling her, and she heard a mechanical buzz and whirr as the twenty-year-old in the turret rotated. One hundred meters ahead, seen through the squalls of smoke that dominated the battlefield, a Tiger emerged from behind the burning wreckage of another Tiger, and her boy fired. She felt the rock as the tank discharged its shell, saw it hit the flank on the squared profile and detonate, casting a galaxy of sparks pinwheeling into the air. The German was not fazed; his own turret ground another few degrees and he fired, the shock of the blast ripping up the earth beneath the muzzle, and in the next nanosecond the impact tossed Petrova, light as a feather and frail as a sparrow, into the sky. She landed with a bone-jarring, concussion-inducing thud, her mind fragmenting into slivers as stars danced and planets crashed. In a second, alone and feeling naked on a battlefield full of raging monsters, she picked up enough sense to seek shelter behind the burned-out wreck of a tank, so melted and charred that its alliance could not be discerned. She crouched, looking back to the vehicle that had ferried her to this place, and saw it listed over, smoke issuing from its hatch, until it was engulfed in flame. Nobody got out, and of its other snipers aboard, none could be seen.
She disengaged her rifle from its sling, cinched up, and found a shooting position. She looked for targets. In time, her peripheral vision oriented her toward a blur of movement, and she saw a Tiger grinding through a glade of higher vegetation. It was hit, and a massive geyser of dust engulfed it. Then the cloud cleared and she saw that the thing had taken a shell in the tread, the tread snaked free, driven by the power axle, though the tank was immobile. Its turret hatch opened and she found her position, waited for a man to emerge at the tip of the post reticule in her scope. As he came, her finger killed him. His head jerked at the shot, and his body seemed to turn to liquid as he slipped back into the vehicle. Then a smear of incandescence erupted at the juncture of turret and hull, and in seconds the thing was leaking smoke like blood, then flames, and it was gone to inferno. The dead man had blocked the others from escape.
She looked over her sight, preferring to immediately abandon that image and let her eyes adjust after the brightness of the flame, and scanned the battlefield, seeing vehicle after vehicle conflagrated, all the smoke rising, drifting skyward to form a pall over the battlefield, a low, dark sky that portended the world’s end. Noises — screams, detonations, the rip of metal tearing — filled the air, and waves of heat and grit rode blast zephyrs into her face and eyes. Ashes floated, blotting skin where they landed.
Another tank emerged from the haze, already leaking a tendril of smoke. Who knew what hell it concealed. She planted the rifle against her shoulder, steadied on the turret — not a long shot, less by far than two hundred yards — and felt her trigger stack. He came out — aflame. He rolled back across the hull, over the engine cooling grate, kicking, his arms flailing, nothing left but his agony. Her finger killed him with one shot. Another flamer crawled out and she killed him before he could roll off the turret.
Once she’d committed the unpardonable sin, she could not stop. The plan was ill conceived because the visibility on the battlefield was so limited that scampering panzer crew could not be seen at all, but the dancing flamers, their garish ignition fluttering brilliantly through the drift of smoke and ash, were easy to spot. She shot them all. It didn’t matter.
She made a shot at five hundred yards, holding half a man high; she made one at fifty yards, drilling him as he leaped out of the half-track that already had turned into a bonfire. She shot not at men but at flames, for the men were largely indistinct in their cloaks of flaring brilliance. Russian, German, peasant, aristocrat, who knew? Their insane jerkiness contained their suffering; she could not abide it and she put them down into stillness.
It was almost ritual. When the rifle fired dry, she slid another stripper into the breach and thumbed five more cartridges into the magazine well, then tossed away the empty stripper and rammed the bolt home, and remounted the rifle against the tension of the strap. Through the circle of the optic, she saw it all, death at the apex of industrial application, but by now her ears were numb, so it was silent cinema, the same thirty feet of film over and over in an endless loop, the flamer clawing at the pulses of energy that consumed his flesh in agony and then the arrival of the message of mercy as his blazing body went slack and he tumbled down. Cock and look anew for a target. In the end, she killed more than fifty unrecorded men that day, only the first one without the flames.
It abated around five. The few surviving tanks limped back to their own lines. It was clear that while the Russians had lost far more, they had stopped the Germans. In fact, it was clear that the war was now technically over. Only a thousand miles of mopping up remained, and though that would be a hideous task and claim millions or more lives, the shattering of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps ended Hitler’s invasion. He would, he could, never be on the offense again.
If she knew this, it didn’t matter. She was exhausted and somehow ashamed. She felt no glory. Around her there lay a wilderness of dead machines, half of them burning, amid a stench of gas and blood, the occasional loud blast as a shell was lit off by flames, but nobody was shooting anymore. Everybody was too tired to shoot. The setting sun burned through the haze of smoke and ash in the air, and it went all red on the world, on this hunk of field outside Prokhorovka, as if to signify the shedding of so much blood. All was red in the light, the gray German tanks, the green Russian tanks, the dun-colored wheat, the green trees, the white flesh: all suffused in the red of blood.
She disengaged her water bottle, unscrewed the cap, and put it to her mouth. A warm swish of water cut through the phlegm of ash that encased her lips. She took off her hood, felt her hair cascade free. She looked around again.
Remember it, Petrova, she instructed herself. Infinite destruction. Ruin to the horizon and death everywhere. Stalingrad in the wheat fields without a ruined city to hide the ripe slaughter.
A whistle, loud and urgent, came from close by, jerking her from the field of ruin and death at Kursk to the German boot a few inches from her face. She heard him grunt as if cursing. He tamped his pipe against the receiver of his machine pistol. Burning tobacco from the emptied pipe fell to the ground a few inches ahead of her. His boots finally lurched forward. She heard a few shouts, the exchange of Serbian curse words, and some crude laughter. The boots vanished.
She raised her head just an inch or two and opened her eyes fully.
The German patrol had vanished in the woods.
Someone had recalled them — urgently.
She waited another half an hour, then picked herself up.
The boots. She remembered the boots. A thousand burned corpses lay about the flatness of Kursk, some licked by flame, some just blurred chars. Yet almost all had their boots still on, because for some reason, while the flesh burned, the leather didn’t. Everywhere she saw nothing but the boots of the dead.