And, by the time the sun rose tomorrow, the tanks that had moved up to the border would be under netting and branches and dead grass that made them effectively invisible from the air. The Red Army took maskirovka seriously. What the enemy couldn’t see, he’d have a harder time wrecking.
During the last war, the Germans had been pretty good at camouflage. But pretty good, against Russians, amounted to pretty bad. From what Morozov had seen of the way the Americans did business, they just didn’t give a damn about concealment. They thought of war as a boxing match. You got into the ring with the other guy and you slugged away till he fell over or you did.
Of course, when you started slugging with atom bombs, you had reason to believe the other guy would be the one who fell. Morozov’s belly knotted. He didn’t want to die like that. But he didn’t see what he could do about it. He might live through another war. If he tried to desert, the MGB absolutely, positively would give him a 9mm bullet in the back of the head.
“Let’s go!” Captain Gurevich shouted, and waved toward the west. “Urra! for the Red Army! Urra! for the Soviet Union!”
Coughing, Sergeant Morozov ducked down into his turret and slammed the cupola hatch shut. The diesel stink was just as thick in here as it had been outside. What kind of maskirovka could you use to hide the smell and the smoke? He imagined fresh-air generators sucking up exhaust and spitting out clean, fragrant, transparent gases. Being only a tank commander, though, he couldn’t imagine how to make those generators.
“Put it in gear, Misha!” he called to the driver through the speaking tube. “We’re going forward.” The T-54 had an intercom system connecting the three men in the turret and the driver farther forward. The tank had the intercom, but Konstantin didn’t trust it. Electrical systems could fail when you needed them most, but what could go wrong with a brass tube?
“Going forward, Comrade Sergeant,” Mikhail Kasyanov answered. Like the gunner and the loader, he was too young to have fought in the Great Patriotic War. Morozov was the only one here who knew what battle was like. He had the bad feeling the others would find out pretty damn quick, though.
The growl from the engine compartment got louder as the T-54 began to move. How much noise did all these tanks make as they advanced? What kind of maskirovka could you use to muffle it or drown it out? As with the black, stinking exhaust, Konstantin could see something would be useful, but didn’t know enough to work out what it might be.
He peered out through the periscopes set into the cupola. Not much to see: a tank ahead, another behind. He swore under his breath. He’d be breathing those stinking fumes till they got where they were going.
His station was on the right side of the turret. The gunner’s seat was a little lower, to the left of the cannon’s breech. The loader’s was farther back and farther down still. It was crowded in there, especially with the T-54’s low, rounded turret, made to deflect shells coming from any direction. The ideal tankman for one of these beasts should have been no more than 170 centimeters tall. Konstantin was a little too big, and had to be extra careful when he moved around. So did Pavel Gryzlov, the gunner. Mogamed Safarli, the loader, was about the right size.
There’d been only a commander and a loader in the original T-34’s turret. The commander aimed and fired the cannon along with everything else he had to take care of. The Nazis, who’d separated commander and gunner from the start, could shoot rings around those T-34s, even if the tanks themselves outdid anything Germany made.
When the Red Army upgunned the T-34 from 76 to 85 millimeters, the engineers stole a page from the Hitlerites’ book. The new, bigger turret held three men. It also had a cupola for the commander to use. All Soviet tanks from then on kept that same system.
One difference between the T-54 and its ancestors was that Misha had no company up front. The T-34 carried a bow machine gun as well as one coaxial with the main armament. T-54s got along with just the coaxial machine gun. You could fill that many more tanks with four-man crews than if they took five.
After a while, Konstantin opened the hatch atop the cupola and stood up to look around. You could see so much more if you did that than if you stuck with the periscopes. Of course, you also made a far juicier target. Sometimes you had to do it, though, even in combat, if you were going to get the most out of your tank.
Now all he got was a smelly breeze in the face. The noise was far louder than it had been with the tank buttoned up. They wouldn’t just hear it on the far side of the border. They’d hear it on the far side of the Rhine.
He worried about that, which was the only thing he could do about it. What were the Americans up to, there on the other side of the plowed ground and barbed wire and tank traps that marked the frontier between the two main conquerors of the Third Reich? How ready were they?
Tank against tank, man against man, Konstantin was ready to fight them. He wasn’t eager-few people who have seen once what war is like are eager to see it again. And anyone who has seen it once knows that anything that can happen can happen to him. Anything, no matter how horrible. So no, Morozov wasn’t eager. Willing, yes.
He thought the Red Army could overrun the rest of Germany and stand on the Rhine in a matter of days. It could…unless the Americans started dropping those atomic bombs. Not all the steel in the T-54’s hull and turret would save him from one of those.
Something pale ghosted by the tank on silent wings, close enough to make Konstantin jump. Then he realized it was only a barn owl. He wondered why it would fly so near the noise and the smells of a tank column on the move. Then he wondered how many mice and rats and rabbits the tanks were scaring out of their nests. Maybe the owl knew what it was doing after all.
Foot soldiers waved the tanks of Captain Gurevich’s company into position just out of sight of the frontier. More foot soldiers draped them with netting covered with grass and with white cloth to create from above the impression of snowy ground. Things probably wouldn’t look the same as they had before the tanks got here, but they wouldn’t look so very different, either.
Konstantin got out of his T-54 after it went under the camouflage. He carefully checked the ground on which the machine sat. It was hard and firm-indeed, frozen here and there. The tank wouldn’t sink in very far. The crew could sleep under it. They’d be almost as safe as if they’d stayed inside, and much more comfortable.
“It’s cold out here,” Mogamed Safarli whined.
“You’ve got your greatcoat and a blanket. What else do you want?” Morozov said. To a Russian, the kind of cold you got in Germany, even at the start of February, wasn’t worth getting excited about. But Safarli was a blackass from Azerbaijan or one of those other places that didn’t know what winter was all about.
They ate. They smoked. They drank a little vodka. They talked in low voices. Then they wrapped themselves up and slept. The Red Army taught everybody-even blackasses-to get through a really cold night with nothing but a greatcoat. It wasn’t all that cold tonight. And they had blankets along with their coats. Nothing to it.
Nothing to it tonight. Tomorrow…Tomorrow was liable to be a different story.
–
Max Bachman nodded when Gustav Hozzel walked into the print shop. “Morning,” he said.
“Morning,” Gustav said. He glanced toward the east. Any German who’d served on the Russian front had developed that kind of anxious, wary glance. When you looked east like that, you wondered what would be coming your way in the next few minutes or the next few days. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be anything you wanted.