Konstantin Morozov didn’t know what would happen to a soldier who flipped the switch on a flashlight or even struck a match to get some extra light by which to examine something. The Chekists wouldn’t shoot the poor imbecile. That would be too merciful. No, they’d take him away to dispose of him at their leisure. Better the attack should go in short one tank than that a fool or a traitor should give everything away.
He hadn’t slept all night. Little white tablets made sure he wouldn’t. He still had most of them left. He didn’t expect to sleep for the next couple of days. His heart thumped in his chest. His eyes opened very wide. Every time he blinked, his eyelids reminded him how dry and sandy they were. The pep pills were on the job, all right.
He checked his watch again. It was 0454. The last time he’d looked down at his left wrist, it had been 0451; the time before that, 0447. He expected to check a couple of more times in the next six minutes.
“You’re ready to go, right, Misha?” he demanded of Mikhail Kasyanov.
“Da, Comrade Sergeant!” The driver sounded absurdly confident. Only somebody who had no idea what war was all about could seem so relaxed at a time like this. Kasyanov figured it would be a walkover. He couldn’t imagine anything going wrong.
Konstantin Morozov, unfortunately, could. At the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army had massively outnumbered its Hitlerite foes. It had tanks and planes and men and fuel and ammo falling out of its asshole. And attacks still got screwed up. The Germans would fall back a couple of kilometers so artillery barrages fell on empty ground. Then they’d hit you when you came forward expecting them to be knocked flat. Or they’d open up a lane in their defenses to invite you through, then jump you from the flanks and rip up your striking column. They had more tricks than a trained circus dog.
If Misha thought the Americans didn’t and wouldn’t, he was using his dick instead of his brain. Well, he’d have sense knocked into him soon enough. 0457 now. Beside Konstantin, Pavel Gryzlov was a wide-shouldered shadow. Lower and farther back, Mogamed Safarli hardly seemed there at all.
0459. Any second now, unless his watch ran fast. Any second, any second, any…
0500. Nothing happened. “Yob tvoyu mat’, you stupid watch,” Morozov snarled. He stared at the luminous tip of the second hand crawling around the dial.
Ten seconds past 0500. Still nothing. Fifteen seconds past 0500. Still nothing. He wanted to smash the watch against the breech of the 100mm gun. That would teach the cheap, worthless thing a lesson.
Seventeen seconds past 0500…and the world exploded. It might not have been as loud as the roar of an atomic bomb, but it was the loudest thing Konstantin had ever heard. He’d been there when the final assault on the Seelow Heights kicked off, just east of Berlin. That had been so loud, it beggared words like thunderous. This, he thought, outdid it.
He had no idea how many Katyusha batteries and big guns the Red Army had right here. He had no idea how many covered the whole length of what the imperialists called the Iron Curtain. Lots was a pretty fair guess for the first of those, lots and lots for the second. Even with the tank buttoned up, the noise was a palpable blow against the ears.
Konstantin had to remind himself to shout, “Gun it, Misha!” over or through the impossible din. Either Kasyanov heard him or he remembered they were supposed to get moving as soon as the bombardment started. They were at the very tip of the point of the Soviet spear.
Rockets and shells were still flying west as fast as the crews who served the weapons could send them. The artillerymen had to be as happy as clams right now. They were laying Germany waste, always the dream of any Red Army soldier. The T-54 began to vibrate: the motor was running. Normally, it made a considerable racket. Now, the cannons and the rocket launchers ensured that Morozov knew he was going only through the seat of his coveralls.
The tank clattered west, along with the rest of the machines from Captain Gurevich’s company, the rest of the machines from the regiment, the rest of the machines from the Guards Tank Army…the rest of the machines from whatever large fraction of the Red Army Stalin had committed to the attack against Western Europe.
“Next stop, the Rhine!” Morozov whooped. That wasn’t literally true, but it was the operational goal of this enormous onslaught. Once they’d cleared out the western zones of Germany, they would decide whether the Low Countries and France deserved a dose of the same medicine.
Hitler’d given it to them. And Hitler’s forces, not quite eleven years ago, had been nothing, nothing at all, next to the swarm of steel and soldiers roaring west now. The defenders might be more ready to do their jobs than they had been in 1940, but Konstantin didn’t dwell on that. Forward! was all he cared about.
Go as fast as you can and blow up anything in your way. That was what the attack orders amounted to. Bogging down was the worst thing that could happen. The Germans had in 1941, when mud and then snow made them fight in ways they hadn’t planned for. It ended up costing them victory.
There were worse dangers now to bogging down and bunching up than there had been during the last war. If you concentrated like that, you gave the enemy a perfect chance to drop an atom bomb on your head. That would slow up your advance like nobody’s business.
Captain Gurevich had said the Americans wouldn’t do that to territory they were supposed to be defending. No: he’d said he hoped they wouldn’t do that to such territory. Konstantin hoped the same thing. Oh, did he ever! After all, he was betting his life on that hope.
Misha steered the tank around the burning carcass of one that had stopped something. It happened, however much you wished it wouldn’t. Not even the most overwhelming barrages knocked down all the enemy’s defenses and gave you a walkover. Konstantin had seen that too many times against the Fritzes. Defenders were like cockroaches; you couldn’t kill them all.
A lance of flame brewed up another Soviet tank. Konstantin nudged Pavel Gryzlov as he traversed the turret with his other hand. “Give them a burst of machine-gun fire there,” he told the gunner. “That’s a goddamn bazooka team.”
“I’ll do it,” Gryzlov answered, and he did. Brass cartridge cases clattered down onto the floor of the fighting compartment. “We’re over the frontier, then, Comrade Sergeant?”
“We must be,” Morozov said. “It’ll get light pretty soon. Then we’ll be able to see what we’re doing.”
Before long, enough fires were blazing so he didn’t need to wait for sunrise to have a pretty fair notion of what was going on. A lot of those fires came from smashed T-54s, T-34/85s, and heavy Stalin breakthrough tanks. The Soviet theory was that you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Tanks were as disposable as machine-gun rounds. So were tank crews, something Konstantin didn’t like to think about.
But enemy tanks blazed, too. The American machines were taller than their squat Soviet counterparts. Their armor wasn’t so well sloped, either. As the Nazis did before them, though, they had excellent fire control. They scored hits from ranges a T-54 was unlikely to match. Only one thing to do about it: get in close and slug. Along with the rest of the Red Army, Morozov’s tank did it.
8
For once, Gustav Hozzel was sleeping like a rock. Nothing bothered him-not lumps in the mattress, and not nightmares going back to his days on the Eastern Front. He simply lay there, forgetting the world and by the world forgot.
At five o’clock in the morning, the world remembered him-and everybody else anywhere close to the border between the western and eastern parts of Germany. For a few confused seconds, he thought a thunderstorm was hitting Fulda. But no rain drummed on the roof, and all the noise came out of the east.