'Maintain course. And give me everything you've got. Go like hell!'
The Panther rumbled forward, suddenly at top speed. The guns of the T-34s were traversing a little too slowly. Jaeger was midway between them when the Soviet commanders realized this maniac was continuing to advance past them.
They ordered their gunners to traverse to an angle of ninety degrees. The guns went on turning. Jaeger went on advancing. The Soviet commanders gave the order simultaneously.
'Fire…!'
A second earlier Jaeger passed beyond them. The guns of the two T-34s faced each other. The shells passed each other in mid-flight and detonated. Looking back, Jaeger saw the tanks burning, flames leaping from the turrets. So far he had not fired a shot.
'Continue to advance on the same course…'
Earlier he had seen the two tanks approaching, one behind the other before they separated to avoid bunching into a solid target. Jaeger could clearly see the marks of their tracks and he guided his Panther along the same avenue.
Minefields! The everlasting gut terror of all tank commanders. By keeping to the track course of the burning T-34s Jaeger knew he was safe from mines. The wisdom of his judgement was vindicated a moment later when he heard a series of explosions.
To his left and right three Panthers were disabled or destroyed. One had a track sheared off the chassis and stood motionless in the battlefield. Two more were burning where they had encountered mines. Jaeger wirelessed back to the remainder of his squadron.
'Follow in my tracks. Precisely. Pathway through major minefield.'
As he completed his instruction to his operator Jaeger began to worry. Instinctively the incident he had survived told him something strange was happening. Minefields…
The Russians had sown no fewer than 40,000 mines in a single night , each mine capable of disabling a Panther or Tiger tank.
They had sown these lethal weapons in each sector where they knew the Panzer divisions were coming. In the early hours of the morning of 2 July inside the Kremlin, Stalin had finally decided to trust the Woodpecker signals. Given the go-ahead, the Soviet generals had reorganized their entire defences inside the Kursk salient, converting it into the greatest military death-trap in history.
The Germans still fought hard. Low-flying Stukas equipped with cannons swept over the battlefield, wiping out a large number of T-34 tanks. Across a vast area savage tank duels were fought but Hitler had lost the vital element of surprise.
It does not take all that much skill to win a battle if you know in advance exactly what the enemy plan is. The two men who really won the turning-point battle of Kursk were absent from the field of carnage. Woodpecker was at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia. The middle-aged, shabbily-dressed Rudolf Roessler was in Lucerne.
Even so, the Russians did not find it a walkover. Fighting continued to rage from 5 July to 22 July as the salient became a charnel house. The casualties on both sides were enormous. Medical personnel on the German side described their field hospitals as slaughterhouses.
Throughout the long days and nights the sound was deafening as the artillery continued to pound, the tanks to fire and the bombs to fall. The earth was desecrated, turned into a desert – a desert littered with shattered planes, tanks, and men.
Colonel Jaeger survived the holocaust – and saved Schmidt. Two Panthers had been blown up under the Colonel and he was in the turret of the third in the midst of chaos and milling confusion when he saw Schmidt, hit by a sniper's bullet, topple over the side of his turret.
'Halt!' he ordered.
Clambering down onto the churned-up earth he ran across as Schmidt's tank detonated a mine. A huge length of track splayed out and slapped, onto the ground. Schmidt, sprawled on his side, looked up.
'Get out of it, Chief! The medics will come for me…'
'Shut up and keep still!'
Jaeger gathered up Schmidt in both his arms and carried him to his own tank. He had reached the Panther when he felt a thump against his leg. He ignored it, hoisting up Schmidt as his wireless operator reached down to grasp the injured man.
'Colonel! Your leg!' the wireless operator shouted to make himself heard above the mind-numbing thunder which never ceased.
'Get Schmidt inside! I can get up myself. That's an order…'
Blood had soaked through the trousers covering the upper part of his leg and the pain was starting. There was a ping against the side of the Panther. That damned sniper again! Gritting his teeth, Jaeger hauled himself rapidly up to the turret, inside and closed the lid.
'There is a bloody spy at the Wolf's Lair – and I'm going to track the bastard down when I get out of here.'
Jaeger was talking to Schmidt in the next hospital bed a week later. By using the Fuhrer's name the SS colonel had managed to get them both transported to a hospital in Munich. He had a definite purpose in choosing this location for their recuperation.
'Why are you so sure now?' Schmidt enquired. 'Kursk!'
'So, we lost the battle – it doesn't mean we lost the war..
'I fear, my old friend,' Jaeger said sombrely, 'it means just that. At Kursk, history – it is not an original phrase – trembled in the balance. We should have won, but the Bolsheviks knew our order of battle in advance. I forced my way into the presence of Field Marshal von Kluge afterwards. He agreed with me. The Fuhrer was right, there is a top-level Soviet spy at the Wolf's Lair.'
'Well, there's nothing you can do about it,' Schmidt observed.
They occupied a small two-man ward and both were recovering from their injuries. Jaeger had been shot in the upper right leg, the bullet embedding itself only a few centimetres from the place where he had been shot during the final stages of the 1940 campaign in France.
The doctor had suggested he be invalided out of the army when final recovery took place. He was exhausted by his exertions in so many campaigns. Jaeger's reaction had almost put the doctor into one of his own beds. Grabbing the walking-stick by his bedside the Colonel had thrown back the bedclothes and rested his good leg on the floor.
'You may be a good doctor but you're a bloody lousy psychologist!' he had roared. 'I have a specific job to do – and by God I'm going to do it!'
He waved the stick in a threatening manner. Hauling the bandaged right leg out of bed he stood up, supporting himself by the stick as he hobbled forward menacingly. The doctor backed away from him until the wall stopped his retreat.
'Colonel, you should be in bed…'
'I should be in the Cauldron – searching for a lead to the man who put me here, who left so many thousands of my comrades dead amid the flies and dust of Kursk. I have only one instruction for you, Doctor, get me mobile at the earliest possible moment.'
'I can only do that if you rest, stay in bed…'
The doctor's face had lost its normal colour, confronted by Jaeger who was the picture of ferocity. Holding on with one hand to the bottom of Schmidt's bed, Jaeger raised his stick with the other to emphasize his command.
'Agreed – on one condition. Each day a little more exercise so I can be discharged at the earliest possible moment. There is a war on, hadn't you heard…'
'The same request applies to me,' Schmidt interjected.
'You're to discharge me on the same day as the Colonel leaves…'
'That may be possible,' the doctor agreed cautiously. 'Your chest wound is healing nicely. It was fortunate the bullet passed right through, missing all the vital parts…'
He broke off in mid-sentence as a nursing sister entered, stopped and stared in bewilderment. She was not a particularly attractive woman, arrogant by nature, and on the first day of his admission Jaeger had had to speak severely to her.
'We are holding an important conference,' he informed her with a straight face. 'No bedpan interruptions at the moment.'