Alyosha Krigoff put his head down only reluctantly, and felt the concussion of the explosion through the ground on which he lay. Next to him, Paulina Koninin failed to display that caution, remaining upright to see and photograph above the rim of the muddy ditch in which they had taken shelter.
Abruptly she cursed, finally dropping into the foxhole and clutching her bleeding hand. Her eye was wide with concern.
“Are you all right?” asked the colonel worriedly. He saw the blood and gasped. “You’re wounded!”
She exhaled a sigh of relief and held up her camera so that the blood dripped down her arm, and not onto the lens of her precious instrument. “I was afraid the body was cracked open,” she explained. “That would have ruined a fine roll of film—such pictures!”
“What about your hand?” asked Krigoff, a little awed by her dedication to her craft. After all, German artillery had zeroed in on their position, and shells continued to rain down on them, exploding on all sides. Their survival under these circumstances was not something that could be taken for granted. His
own tank had been crippled, a track blown off by an enemy shot. Krigoff had leaped into this ditch when the lieutenant informed him that his advance was over, and he had found Paulina down here, poking her head up to snap picture after picture.
“Oh, that—just a flesh wound,” she explained, at last examining the injury. “A lucky piece of shrapnel must have gotten me.” Indeed, the colonel could see that her little finger was torn open along half its length, and his stomach churned as he saw a white flash within the nasty gash that could only be the bone of her finger.
“We should get you to an aid station,” he blurted, shocked by this real proof of war.
“For this?” she scoffed. She rolled onto her back in the muddy hole, resting her camera on her belly as she reached into her side pouch and came out with a dirty handkerchief. She wrapped her little finger alongside the ring and middle fingers of the same hand, then used her other hand and her teeth to tie the cloth into a tight wrap. She picked up her camera again and manipulated some of the controls, then flashed him a grin. “There—I can still focus, and shoot!”
Krigoff’s own sense of focus was growing more than a little fuzzy. The chaos of the battlefield was making it very hard for him to think, to process information in the calm and rational manner that his role as army intelligence officer required. The artillery had been bad enough, but now those guns had been joined by a chorus of antitank weapons, and even several powerful cannon that Paulina had suggested must be German tanks. Briefly, he longed for the shelter of the armored turret that had protected him in the T-34.
He looked toward that tank, which squatted all by itself in the road, the other vehicles of the column having rolled into the field when they started coming under antitank fire. No less than a dozen Russian tanks were burning around him, though the T-34s were firing boldly back against the mostly hidden enemy. The damaged tank looked particularly vulnerable, since the track had been shattered on the right front, and several of the bogey wheels in the suspension were nothing more than twisted sprockets.
But the gun was still firing. Krigoff felt a grudging measure of admiration for the young lieutenant, who had insisted upon staying with his crippled vehicle. The colonel watched the turret swivel slightly, bringing the long cannon around in a small traverse. The gunner made an adjustment, depressing that barrel slightly so that it was just parallel to the ground, and then the tank spat out a round, fire flashing from the muzzle, instantaneously replaced with a waft of black smoke.
As Krigoff was watching he saw a white flash, so bright that the light lingered even when he closed his eyes. A second later he felt the blast and heard
the explosion. Blinking, he strained to see, and was finally able to make out details again. The turret of the crippled T-34 was unrecognizable, as half of it had been blown away. The gun was canted off at a crazy angle, and the colonel could look right into the crew compartment. There was no sign of the lieutenant, and—to judge from the violence of the explosion—Krigoff was pretty certain that no part of him would ever be found.
“Damned 88!” cursed Paulina, shaking her head, then rolling onto her stomach, crawling up to the lip of the ditch, and staring in the direction of the enemy emplacements.
“What?” asked Krigoff, forcing himself to lift himself up to her level. He could make out nothing in the smoke and gray rubble of the city’s outskirts.
“It’s an antitank gun,” she said. “Actually, antiaircraft by design, but it’s a cursed good tank killer and these bastards know how to use them.”
“Oh, yes, I remember,” Krigoff acknowledged, embarrassed that he had forgotten such a detail in the heat of the moment. He heard that loud crack again, and another T-34 blew up, sending a plume of fire rising thirty or forty feet into the sky.
“It must be over there, behind that wall,” Paulina said. “I can’t see it for sure.” She raised her camera, pressing the viewer against her good eye, and snapped another picture. “I think there’s still a bridge standing down there—that’s probably why they’re fighting so hard on this side of the river.”
Krigoff had no idea which wall she was talking about; everything looked the same to him, more like an expanse of rubble strewn along the horizon than any recognizable structure. But a bridge—that was crucial news! He looked to the side, where still more Russian tanks were catching fire. None of them were advancing any more, and in fact he saw several of the T-34s starting to back away, though they moved in reverse so that their guns could keep up the steady barrage of fire against the enemy line.
“How can you see a bridge?” he asked. “I can’t even see down into the valley!”
She rolled over until she was lying right beside him, and pointed with her good hand. He followed the line of her finger. “Those are the towers of a bridge stanchion,” she said. “Of course, there’s no guarantee that the road—or rail, perhaps—is still there, but it’s a good sign that the piers are in place. And why else would they be fighting here, when they could just fall back and use the river for protection?”
“Why else, indeed,” Krigoff thought. In fact, her suggestion made perfect sense. His heart was pounding, not in fear but excitement. A bridge across the Oder—a bridge to Berlin!
“Shit!” Paulina snapped in irritation.
“What is it? Are you wounded again?”
She shook her head and held up the camera. “That shrapnel broke the
rewinder. I’ve shot up this whole roll, and I can’t open it up out here to change my film or I’ll lose all these pictures.”
Alyosha felt a surge of relief. “I have to get back to headquarters and report to General Petrovsky, tell him about this bridge,” he said. “Come with me—certainly there’ll be a place you can use as a darkroom.”
“Might as well,” she agreed. “I can’t do any good out here until I get some fresh film in my camera.”
For an hour they crawled through the cold, slushy ditch, gradually moving away from the German lines. Finally they were beyond the range of the shelling, and they stood up to start walking. Krigoff saw a scout car racing past, and waved it down.
“Yes, Comrade Colonel?” asked the driver, a young Siberian.
“I need to get to army headquarters! Take me there at once!”
The driver nodded agreeably, and pointed to the door on the other side of the cab. “Hop in,” he said. Ten seconds later they were racing toward the rear.
“Ah, Philby, old man. Good to see you. Rather beastly weather, what?” Ian Weatherspoon was a portly, tweedy man who sported a bushy mustache that completely covered his upper lip. He was one of those men whose handshake was a fundamental test of masculine prowess; Kim Philby extracted his own fingers from the grip ahead of certain injury.
“W-Weatherspoon. Good to s-see you as well. Thanks for making t-time.”
“Always have time for you. Sit down, sit down. What’s all this about Jerry taking interest in one of our programs?”
Philby sat down, placed his briefcase upon his lap, snapped open the catches, and extracted a file folder. He opened it, pulled out a single sheet of paper, and passed it across the desk. “This is an extract f-from a report we received—the source is pro-protected, of course—”
“Of course, of course,” Weatherspoon agreed, taking the paper.
“Our friends in Peenemünde—you know, that’s the Jerry m-missile program—evidently are showing some interest in one of our research programs that goes by the name of … let me see …” Philby looked down at the folder. “ … ‘tube alloys.’ It seems they have a mole inside the program who has been feeding them some useful information.” Philby glanced up. Weatherspoon’s ruddy complexion had gone pale. Pay dirt! He had had to guess what part of the German apparatus would most alarm the “tube alloys” people, and had settled on the German missile program as the most interested party. Whatever “tube alloys” was hiding, it was a weapon that could be used in conjunction with a missile.
“Are you sure about this?”
Philby gave a casual shrug. “As sure as anything can be in the intelligence game, you know. At least h-half of what we get is p-pure garbage. The t-trouble
is, we never know w-which half.” He laughed. Weatherspoon was too upset to join him in the joke. Very good. Very good indeed.
“How can we help?” Weatherspoon asked.
“First, I wanted to put you on a-alert, just in case there’s s-something here. S-Second, I thought I might l-look through some p-personnel lists, if it’s not t-too much trouble? The best way to catch a mole is to salt some special information with a likely person and then see if that information m-makes it across. T-Try it with different people and different bits of information, and as Bob’s your uncle, there’s your mole.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Thanks, old man. I don’t mind telling you, if ‘tube alloys’ were to be compromised, it could be serious. Quite serious. Can’t say much about it, but it’s important.”
“Well, I’m glad for once that MI-6 and MI-5 can work on the same side of the street. Now, you mentioned on the telephone that you had a few problems in the other direction where I might be of some small assistance …”
Some time later, after Philby had left, Ian Weatherspoon made a telephone call. “Sir, I received an inquiry today concerning ‘tube alloys.’ … Yes, sir … . It was from Mr. Kim Philby. He’s deputy chief of Section 5, MI-6 … . Yes, that Philby … . He says there’s a German mole in the project and information is traveling to the German missile program at Peenemünde … . Yes, sir … . He wanted personnel records, sir … . Key technical staff … . I did provide them as he requested, sir … . Yes, the contact seemed legitimate enough to me, but your standing orders were that any contact be reported and that all contacts were to be investigated. Therefore, I ordered surveillance to be placed on him. I hope that was in order, sir … . Thank you, sir … . Yes, I’ll keep the surveillance going, sir, and report any subsequent contacts … . I agree, sir. The likelihood is that Philby is on the up-and-up, but better safe than sorry, eh? … Yes, sir … . Thank you, sir … . Good-bye.”
The drone of a hundred airplane engines penetrated the din of shelling, shouts, and small-arms fire. Lukas was looking at the sky when his corporal, a lanky twenty-year-old from East Prussia, grabbed him by the arm and threw him onto the pile of rubble that formed their makeshift foxhole. Ten seconds later the ground shook so hard that he was lifted into the air. He tumbled back onto the jagged bricks, cursing as the sharp edges tore at his face and hands. Shrapnel whistled over his head, jagged steel making eerie wailing sounds as it tore through the air.
“Thanks. You saved—” Lukas turned toward the corporal and saw the man’s eyes, open but sightless, staring in his direction. Stunned, the young soldier
reached for the fellow’s shoulder, and when he tugged slightly the lifeless corpse rolled over to reveal a gory mess at the back of his skull.
“Goddammit!” he cursed, rolling on his back to shake a fist at the Soviet fliers. Guilt surged within him, for he suspected the corporal would not have perished, had he not raised himself up to save his young lieutenant from the same fate. A lump tightened in his throat, but Lukas would not let himself cry.
He stared skyward, amazed at the number of winged shapes that seemed to be breaking downward, plummeting directly toward him. The dive bombers came on in waves of ten or twenty, winging over from high altitude, plunging toward the earth with earsplitting screams, releasing their bombs like little turds when it seemed as though the aircraft must plunge straight into the ground. But the pilots were skilled; they pulled their Sturmoviks out of the nearly suicidal dives and roared away, a hundred meters above the ground, as their lethal loads slammed into the ruined terrain on the outskirts of Küstrin.
Each wave of explosions rippled through the air and ground, louder and far more violent than the most furious thunderstorm. This was worse than any artillery barrage, and not just because the bombs were bigger than the shells fired by even the heaviest guns. To Lukas, there was something maddeningly purposeful in the vicious fliers, for he knew that each bomb was delivered personally by an enemy pilot. He wanted to blast the sky, empty the magazine of his machine pistol, but he withheld this irrational impulse, knowing that—as close as they looked—the planes were flying too high for him to offer any threat whatsoever. Instead, he vowed to make his bullets count, when the Soviet infantry came advancing across this hellish wasteland.
But he truly wondered if the Red Army would even have to attack, so potent, so powerfully destructive was this deadly bombardment. He saw Peiper’s panzer, still crouched between the ruined buildings, now covered with a layer of bricks and dust cast by the relentless explosions. He ducked and pressed his face into the ground, his hands over his head, when the bombs struck nearby, and his back and shoulders were bruised from the rain of debris that came tumbling out of the sky after each crunching blast.
More roars filled his ears as another wave, and then another, of the horrible airplanes swept down. Some of the pilots were exceptionally hateful; they flew through the bombardment of their comrades, strafing, sending streams of whining bullets and explosive cannon shells into the ruins where the German infantry and armor sought shelter—shelter that didn’t actually exist.
How many airplanes did they have? Lukas couldn’t even begin to imagine. It seemed as though the same bombers must be circling around, dropping new explosives with each pass, but he didn’t think this was the case. In fact, when one flight flew low overhead he saw that each Sturmovik carried but one of the deadly bombs under its belly. There were just so many of them that they could keep sending fresh aircraft into the fray, while those that had dropped their
payloads had enough time to return to their airbases, rearm, and come back to maintain the uninterrupted onslaught.
A frightening thought occurred to him: What if the enemy infantry was using the cover of this bombardment to creep closer, ready to lunge forward in a great human wave and wipe out these few shell-shocked Germans who stood between them and the precious bridge? He looked around. The men of his platoon were invisible, each having wormed his way as deep into a hole as he possibly could. He didn’t even know if any of them were still alive, though it seemed logical that, since he had survived, some of them had made it too. But certainly none of them were keeping watch against the approach of Soviet troops.
Resolutely, Lukas decided to look for himself. He crept out of his hole, pressing flat against the broken ground as a bomb exploded nearby, then crawling forward and upward until he reached the top of the pile of bricks he had been using for shelter. Lying flat, he raised his head just high enough to look over to the other side. His hand was on his knife, as he half expected some Mongol infantrymen to be lurking there, waiting to spring forward with fixed bayonets and savage Asian battle cries.
There was no human being in sight. Instead, he saw a landscape of terribly broken ground, shell holes and craters eliminating even the traces of what kinds of buildings, gardens, and streets might have been there before the war. He couldn’t see more than one or two hundred meters; beyond that the smoke and dust was so thick that there could have been a hundred tanks lurking there, and he wouldn’t have seen a single turret. Somewhat relieved, but still uncertain, he slid back down the pile of bricks and curled into his small foxhole next to the lifeless corporal.
He tried to reassure himself: If the Russians sent troops to advance through this storm of explosions, they would have to find men who were either insanely brave or criminally stupid. From what he’d heard of the Soviet army, however, neither of these categories seemed likely to be in short supply. He resolved to take frequent trips to the crest of his little pile of rubble, and to keep his machine pistol handy.
Time passed like a nightmare that would never end. Eventually Lukas became numb to the danger of instant death, deafened to the chaotic thunder of explosions that formed such a claustrophobic perimeter around his world. The shock of each blast seemed like part of normal life, a violent backdrop to an existence that could not possibly last more than a few minutes, an hour at the most. He looked up, but couldn’t see the planes that still roared overhead, and realized that it was getting dark. That seemed right—nightmares should happen at night, after all.
For a while he lay on his back and stared at the dark, glowering sky. Only gradually did the realization come to him: There were no more bombs, and all
the aircraft engines were fading away as the last flight of Sturmoviks winged back to their bases. The sound continued to grow more faint, and there was no sign of a fresh wave of aerial attackers. He shook his head, trying to think, and then he understood. If he couldn’t see the bombers, then they couldn’t see their targets, either.
Suddenly the night seemed like a very beautiful thing.
His pleasant reflection was interrupted by a rattle of small arms fire, a German machine gun from some other platoon opening up, several hundred meters away. Of course—now the Red Army would come! Quickly he pushed himself out of his foxhole to climb up the hill of broken bricks, peering over the top to try and discern movement in the thickening dusk. All around, the men of his platoon were coming out, doing the same thing, rifles at the ready as each veteran panzergrenadier sought a good firing position.
For a long time Lukas stared into the darkness, which was nearly complete by now. He heard shooting on both sides, but couldn’t see anything that looked like a target, and he didn’t want to waste his ammunition firing at figments of his imagination. The main gun of Peiper’s tank suddenly cracked off a round and he saw a blast of fire as a Soviet tank was hit. The stricken T-34 went off like a Roman candle, glowing sparks cascading into the sky and scattering across the bumpy, irregular terrain of the battlefield. In that surge of light he saw plenty of targets, Russian soldiers who—knowing they were illuminated—threw themselves to the ground and instantly vanished into the natural foxholes created by the crushing bombardment and the earlier artillery barrage.
Suddenly a bright light burst into view, a flare fired from a German gun on the other side of the river. Lukas was ready, and he squeezed off a burst from his Schmeisser, scattering a detachment of enemy infantry. Many of them fell, and though he didn’t know if they were hit or were just taking cover, his instincts told him that his aim had been good.
The Panther fired again, a high explosive shell this time that exploded near where Lukas had been aiming. He heard screams of pain out there and he all but snarled in satisfaction, delighted that the enemy was being made to suffer some of the same punishment their hated jabos had inflicted on the defending Germans.
The Russians seemed to have gone to ground for the time being, as the flare slowly drifted lower, suspended by a parachute. Lukas took advantage of the respite to scramble back down, then to make his way along the position of his men. He found most of them, learned that two more men plus his corporal had been killed by the bombing.
“Go check on Wolfgang,” one suggested, pointing to a niche in the rubble.
Lukas went to look and found a man with a ghastly wound in his leg and hip.
“Wolfgang? How are you feeling?” he asked.
The man grimaced, then lifted his gun. “I can still see, still shoot. I’m a good soldier.”
“Yes, you are,” Lukas said, awed. “You can’t walk on that, can you?”
“Don’t plan on going anywhere,” Wolfgang said, his next breath a gasp of sudden pain.
“Well, when we pull back, we’re taking you with us,” Lukas promised. He saw that the man’s comrades had bandaged the wound as best they could, and the tough grenadier showed the officer that he had found a perch for his rifle. Lying prone, he was able to squeeze off a shot or two every time a target presented itself.
One more of the men was curled up in his foxhole, and when Lukas asked him if he was hurt he began to cry, sobbing like a baby. The young officer tried cajoling and threatening, everything he could think of to get the fellow to come out, but the grenadier simply cradled his head in his hands and rocked back and forth, uttering long, agonized wails. Repressing an angry urge to simply shoot the man for cowardice, Lukas at last left him alone and went back to his own vantage, the brick pile that was near the center of his platoon’s little section of front.
He took stock of the situation. They had eight fighting men left, plus himself—though one was wounded and immobile. All of the soldiers had carbines, and he had his machine pistol. These were good soldiers, and they could hold here for a long time, and kill a lot of Russians while they did it. That was the best he could hope for now.
Another flare sparked in the air and he started to shoot, raking the stream of his bullets across the crests of the rough ground. The Panther fired again, and another Soviet tank burst into flames. Several return shots flew out of the darkness, armor piercing shells punching into the rocky walls around Peiper’s Panther. None of them seemed to do any damage.
Lukas wiped the sweat from his eyes. It occurred to him that he should be getting hungry, but he wasn’t interested in food. Instead, he reached for another clip of ammunition, jammed it into the stock of his machine pistol, drew a deep breath, and waited for his next target to appear.