The three tanks had fanned out into the fields, swinging to present their frontal armor to the village and accelerating forward, their guns barking at the long heaps of rubble on either side of the road. And… yes! One leaped as a white flash erupted under a tread, settled back with a shattered road wheel. Now the Draka machine-guns were opening up, hosing over the stranded behemoth. They could not penetrate the armor; not even the antitank gun could without a side shot, not without great good luck. But they could shatter optics, rattle the crew…
He hammered a fist into the wall in glee; the other two were falling back, unwilling to chance a mine field without engineers or special vehicles to clear it. Accelerating in reverse, they circled the assault guns and climbed back onto the road, retreating until they were hull down in a patch of low ground. Still dangerous, those long 88mm guns had plenty of range, ut the bluff of his scanty handful of antitank mines had worked.
The German infantry carriers had halted well back; their thin armor offered protection from small arms and shell fragments only. Now they were opening up with the twin machineguns each carried, and the Waffen-SS panzergrenadiers were spilling out of the opened ramp doors at the rear of each vehicle. Eric could see them marshalling, fanning out west of the road. They could see the waiting V-spread of wire and trench that threatened to funnel them into a killing ground as they advanced south; their officers' shouts pushed them toward the sheltering forest, where they could operate under cover and flank the strong frontal positions. Even a few snipers and machine-guns upslope from the village could make field trenches untenable.
"Smart, Fritz; by the book," he murmured. The Draka infantry were opening up with their crew-served weapons; a few of the Germans were falling under the flail of the 15mm's, but that was over a thousand meters, extreme range, and the Germans were making skillful use of cover. Happily, he waited for them to reach the protection of the woods. They would do it on the run; even well-trained soldiers threw themselves into cover when under fire. The trees would beckon, and they had already been shaken by what had happened to their armor.
"Now," he whispered. Now it was up to those at the treeline.
"
Not yet
," the Draka decurion murmured to himself. The Germans had been coming in across the fields well spread out, but they bunched as they approached the treeline, the underbrush was thinner here and they were unconsciously picking the easiest way in. In out of the punishing fire coming from the Draka positions, up the valley to their left. Bunching, speeding up, their attention divided.
The moment stretched. Above him a bird sounded a liquid
di-di-di
, announcing its nesting territory to the world. The Draka soldier waited behind the log, his eyes steady on flickers of movement through a shimmering haze of leaves, confident in the near-invisibility of camouflage uniform and motionlessness. His tongue ran over dry lips, tasting forest mold and green dust.
Insects buzzed, burrowed, dug.
"
Course, they-all could spot those dumbshit Ivans
, he thought. The Russian partisans were with him, a tetrarchy's worth with captured Fritz weapons. Forget about that, concentrate…
Ya
…
Now
! His thumb clamped on the safety-release of the detonator, and he rapped it sharply three times on the moss-grown trunk of the fallen beech before him. Ahead of him the thick band of undergrowth along the forest edge exploded, erupted into a chaos of flying dust, shedded leaves, wood chips.
Louder than the explosion was a humming like a hundred thousand metal bees: Broadsword directional mines, curved plates lined with
plastique
, the concave inner face tight-packed with razor-edged steel flechertes like miniature arrows. Pointed toward an enemy, mounted at waist-height, they had the effect of titantic shotgun shells. The German infantry went down, scythed down, the first ranks shredded, sliced, spattered back into their comrades' faces.
They halted for an instant, too stunned even to seek cover. The loudest sound was the shrill screaming of the wounded—men lying thrashing with helmets, weapons, harness nailed to their bodies. The decurion rolled to his Holbars, over it, came up into firing position and began picking targets, hammering three-round bursts.
"Ya! Ya! Beautiful, fuckin'
beautiful
!" he shouted. The others of his stick opened up from positions in cover, and a volley of grenades followed.
Grunting in annoyance, the Draka NCO noticed one of the Russian partisans he had been assigned kneeling, staring slack-jawed at the chewed bodies in SS uniforms that lay in clumps along a hundred meters of the forest edge. He was shaking his head, mouth moving silently, the Schmeisser dangling limply from his hands.
"
Shoot
, yo' stupid donkeyfucka!" The Draka dodged over and planted his boot in the Russian's buttocks with a thump.
"Useless sonofabitch,
shmert, shmert
Fritz!"
The partisan scarcely seemed to feel the blow. He grinned, showing the blackened jagged stumps of teeth knocked out by a rifle butt; through the rags on his back bruises showed yellow and green and black.
"Da, da," he mumbled, raising the machine-pistol. Holding it clamped tight to the hip and loosing off a burst, then another; short bursts, to keep the muzzle from rising too much. He came to his feet, disregarding the return fire that was beginning to whine overhead and drop clipped-off twigs on their heads. His bullets hosed out, across the back of a wounded SS grenadier who was hobbling away with a leg trailing, using his rifle for a crutch.
"
Da! Da
!" he shouted.
The decurion dropped away. The partisans had opened up all along the treeline, thirty of them thickening up his firepower quite nicely. The SS were rallying, crawling forward now; a MG34 machine-gun began firing in support, and an 88mm shell from one of the tanks smashed a giant hornbeam into a pillar of splinters and fire. Thick green-wood smoke began to drift past as the first Germans reached the woodland and crashed through the tangled resiliency of the bushes. They were still taking casualties, of course, and still under fire from the village on their left flank. The Draka paused to smack a fresh drum into his Holbars, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. In a moment they would fall back, into the thick woods; the partisans could cover that. Fall back to the
next
ambush position; the trees would channel pursuit nicely. He doubted the Germans would come farther than that, this time.
Beside him, the Russian was laughing.
Eric watched as the SS infantry halted, rallied, began to fight their way into the woods. The armored vehicles had swiveled their weapons to support them; only the assault gun kept the village under fire, the heavy shells going over their heads with a freight-train-at-night rush. And the flakpanzers, moving forward and risking their thin plating to hose their quadruple 20mm autocannon over the village, short bursts that hit like horizontal explosive hailstorms. The Draka in the bunker dove for the floor, away from the firing slits. Not that there was much chance of a hit even so; the antiaircraft weapons ate ammo too rapidly to keep up the support fire long enough to saturate an area, but there was no point in risking life for a bystander's view. The action was out of range of their personal weapons, anyway.
Eric continued his scan, forcing the mind's knowledge of probabilities to overcome the hindbrain's cringing. Some of the SS infantry carriers were reversing, ready to reembark their crews; the Fritz commander must be a cool one, prepared to cut his losses.
The Centurion closed his eyes for a moment, struggling to hold the battle whole in his mind without focusing on its component parts.
Know how a man fights and you know what
he is and how he thinks
: the words ran through him like an echo. Who… Pa, of course; that was one of his favorite maxims.
How had the German commander reacted? Well, ruthlessly, to begin with. He had sacrificed that warcar to gain information.
Not afraid of casualties, then. Bold, ready to gamble; he'd tried to rush through with no more than two companies, to push as far up the pass as he could before the Draka solidified their defense.
Eric opened slitted eyes, scratched at the itching yellow stubble under his chin.
Damnation, I wish I had more
information
. Well, what soldier didn't? And he wished he could have spent more time with the partisan leader, pumped him for details, but it was necessary to send him off to contact the others, if anything valuable was to come of that. After showing him enough dead Germans to put some spirit in him and backbone back into his followers, not to mention what Dreiser had done, that was good work. Escape from the cauldron of death that Russia had become was a fine lure, glittering enough to furnish enthusi-asm, but so distant that it was not likely to make them cautious.
But it would have been good to learn a little more about this man Hoth in Pyatigorsk. Still… there had been a bull-like quality to the attack. Plenty of energy, reasonable skill, but not the unexpected, the simple after-the-fact novelty that marked a really inspired touch. The
Liebstandarte
had always been a mechanized unit, no doubt the SS commander knew the value of mobility, but did he understand it was as much an
attitude
as a technique? Or was he wedded to his tanks and carriers, even when the terrain and circumstances were wrong?
What was that speech of Pa's again?
Don't think in terms of
specific problems, think in terms of the task
. A commander who was a tactician and nothing else would look at the Draka position in the village and think of how to crush it; one problem at a time.
I would have tried something different
, he thought.
Hmmmm, maybe waiting until dark, using the time to bring up
reserves, filtered infantry through the woods in the dark and
then attacked from both sides
. It was impossible to bypass the village completely, it sat here in the pass like a fishbone in a throat; but there were ways to keep to the principle of attacking weakness rather than strength…
Ways to manipulate the enemy, as well. Pa again:
If you hurt
him, an untrained man will focus on the pain. In rage, if he's
brave and a fighter; without realizing that even so he's
allowing you to direct his attention, that your Will is master
.
Eric had found that true in personal combat; so few could just
accept
a hurt, keep centered, prevent their mind's eye from rushing to the sensory input of the threatened spot. The way some chess players focused on this check rather than the mate five moves into the future.
Discipline, discipline in your soul;
you aren't a man until you can command yourself, body as well
as
mind. Without inner discipline a man is nothing more than a
leopard that thinks, and you can rule him with a whip and a
chair until he jumps through hoops.
He reached for the handphone of the radio, brushing aside an old resentment. So
you're a bastard, I'm not so stupid I can't see
when you're right
, he thought at the absent form of Karl von Shrakenburg.
Three quick clicks, two slow: recognition signal for the mortars. Focus on the valley below: the German panzergrenadiers falling back from the edge of the woods, dragging their hurt, the SS armor opening up again on the bunker positions, trying to keep the gunners' heads down and cover the retreat. Bright muzzle flashes, the heavy
crack
of high-velocity shot. Flickering wink of automatic weapons, and the sound of the jacketed bullets on rock, like a thousand ball peen hammers ringing on a girder. Stone rang; raw new-cut timber shifted and creaked as the shells
whumped
against rock and dirt filtered down from above and into his collar. He sneezed, hawked, spat grit out of his mouth, blinking back to the brightness of the vision slit.
Wait
for it, wait for it
. Now: now they were clustered around their vehicles.
"Firefall," he said.
Thick rock hid the sound of the automortars firing, the
fumpfumpfump
as their recoil-operated mechanisms stripped shells out of the hoppers and into the stubby smooth-bore barrels. Eric raised the field glasses to his eyes; he could see a flinching as the veterans among the SS troopers dove for cover or their APC's, whichever was closest. Survivors, who knew what to expect. Rifles and machine-guns pin infantrymen, force them to cover, but it is artillery that does the killing, from overhead, where even a foxhole is little help. And all foot soldiers detest mortars even more than other guns; mortar bombs drop out of the sky and spread fragments all around them rather than in the narrow cone of a gun shell. Much less chance to survive a near miss, and there is more explosive in a mortar's round than an artillery shell, which needs a thick steel wall to survive firing stresses.
CRASH.
CRASHCRASHCRASH
… Tiny stick figures running, falling, lifting into the air with flailing limbs. Lightning-wink flashes from the explosions, each with its puff of smoke.
Imagination furnished the rest, and memory: raw pink of sliced bone glistening in opened flesh; screaming and the low whimpering that was worse; men in shock staring with unbelief at the wreck of selves that had been whole fractions of a second before; the whirring hum of jagged cast-iron casing fragments flying too fast to see and the cringing helplessness of being under attack with no means of striking back…
"Sofie," he said. She started, forcing her attention back from the distant vehicles.
"Ya, sir?"
"Can you break me into the Fritz command circuit?" The SS
personnel carriers were buttoning up, the hale dragging wounded up the ramps and doors winching shut. Even thin armor would protect against blast and fragments. The tanks had raised their muzzles, dropping high-explosive rounds in the village on the chance of finding the mortar teams that were punishing their comrades. Brave, since it risked more fire from the antitank guns in the forward positions, but hopeless. More hopeless than the Germans suspected; there were only three of the automortars with the Draka, their rate of fire giving them the impact of a century of conventional weapons. At that, the shells were falling more slowly, one weapon at a time taking up the bombardment, to save ammunition and spare the other barrels from heat buildup.