The tanks’ 120 mm guns stormed and thundered, and the white fog became a wildly flashing pink light display. Almost simultaneously, the first enemy shells fell, the pink light replaced by the blue-white lightning of their explosion. Kalina, lying on her stomach at the bottom of the bomb crater, felt the ground reverberate with the intense percussion like a drumhead. Nearby dirt and rock flew into the air and landed all over her back. Amid the explosions, she could dimly hear the whinny of anti-tank missiles. Kalina felt as if her viscera were tearing apart in the cacophony, and all the universe, the pieces falling toward an endless abyss—
Just as her mind teetered on the breaking point, the tank battle ended. It had lasted only thirty seconds.
When the smoke cleared, Kalina saw that the snowy ground in front of her was scattered with destroyed Russian tanks, heaps of raging flames crowned with black smoke. She looked farther; even without binoculars, she could see a similar swath of destroyed NATO tanks in the distance, appearing as black smoking specks on the snow. But more enemy tanks were rushing past the wreckage, wreathed in the snow spray churned up by their treads. Now and then the Abramses’ ferocious broad wedge heads emerged from the spray like snapping turtles launching themselves out of the waves, their smooth-bore muzzles flashing sporadically like eyes. Just above, the helicopters were still embroiled in their melee. Kalina saw an Apache explode in midair not far away. A Mi-28 wobbled low overhead, trailing fuel from a leak. It hit the ground a few dozen meters away and exploded into a fireball. Short-range air-to-air missiles slashed countless parallel white lines low in the air—
Kalina heard a bang behind her. She turned; not far away, a damaged and badly smoking T-90 dropped its rear hatch. No one got out, but she could see a hand hanging down from it. Kalina leapt from the bomb crater and rushed to the back of the tank. She grabbed hold of the hand and pulled. An explosion rumbled inside the tank. A blast of blazing air forced Kalina back several steps. Her hand held something soft and very hot: a piece of skin pulled loose from the tank crew member’s hand, cooked through. Kalina raised her head and saw flames burst from the hatch. Through it, she could see that the tank interior was already an inferno in miniature. Among the flames, dimly red and transparent, she could clearly see the silhouette of the unmoving crewman, rippling as if in water.
She heard two new shrills. The artillery crew to her front and left fired its last two anti-tank missiles. The wire-guided Sagger missile successfully destroyed an Abrams; the other, radio-guided missile found its signal jammed and veered upward at an angle, missing its target. Meanwhile the six missile crewmen retreated from their bunker, running toward Kalina’s bomb crater as a Comanche helicopter dove for them, its angular chassis resembling the profile of a savage alligator. Machine-gun bullets struck the ground in a long row, their impact abruptly standing snow and dirt up in a fence that just as quickly toppled. The fence crossed through the little squadron, felling four of them. Only a first lieutenant and a private made it over to the crater. There Kalina noticed that the lieutenant was wearing an antishock tank helmet, perhaps taken from a destroyed tank. The two of them held an RPG each.
The lieutenant jumped into the crater. He took a shot at the nearest enemy tank, hitting the M1A2 head-on, triggering its reactive armor, the sound of the rocket explosion and the armor explosion mingling peculiarly. The tank charged out of the cloud of smoke, scraps of reactive armor dangling from its front like a tattered shirt. The young private was still aiming, his RPG jittering with the tank’s rise and fall, too uncertain to fire. Then the tank was just fifty, forty meters away, heading into a dip in the ground, and the private could only stand on the rim of the crater to aim downward.
His RPG and the Abrams’s 120 mm gun sounded simultaneously.
The tank gunner had fired a nonexplosive depleted-uranium armor-piercing round in his desperation. With an initial velocity of eight hundred meters per second, it turned the soldier’s upper body into a spray of gore upon impact. Kalina felt scraps of blood and meat strike her steel helmet, pitter-pattering. She opened her eyes. Just in front of her, at the edge of the crater, the private’s legs were two black tree stumps, soundlessly rolling their way to the bottom of the crater next to her feet. The shattered remains of the rest of his body had spattered a radial pattern of red speckles in the snow.
The rocket had struck the Abrams, the focused jet of the explosion cutting through its armor. Thick smoke billowed from the chassis. But the steel monster was still charging toward them, trailing smoke. It was within twenty meters of them before an explosion from within stopped it in its tracks, hurling the top of its turret sky-high.
The NATO tank line went past them immediately after, the ground trembling under the heavy impact of treads, but these tanks took no interest in their bomb crater. Once the first wave of tanks was past, the lieutenant grabbed Kalina’s hand and leapt from the crater, pulling her after him to the side of an already bullet-scarred jeep. Two hundred meters away, the second wave of armored assault was bearing down on them.
“Lie down and play dead!” the lieutenant said. So Kalina lay by the jeep’s wheel and closed her eyes. “It looks more realistic with your eyes open!” the lieutenant added, and smeared a handful of somebody’s blood on her face. He lay down, too, forming a right angle with Kalina, his head pressing against hers. His helmet had rolled to one side, and his coarse hair pricked at Kalina’s temple. She opened her eyes wide, looking at the sky almost swallowed by smoke.
Two or three minutes later, a half-track Bradley infantry fighting vehicle stopped ten or so meters from them. A few American soldiers in blue-and-white snowy terrain camouflage jumped from the convoy. The bulk of them leveled their guns and advanced in a skirmish line. Only one walked toward the jeep. Kalina saw two snow-speckled paratrooper boots step next to her face; she could clearly make out the insignia of the Eighty-second Airborne Division on the handle of the knife sheathed in his boot. The American crouched down to look at her. Their gazes met, and Kalina tried as hard as she could to make hers blank and lifeless across from that pair of startled blue eyes.
“Oh, god!” Kalina heard him exclaim. She didn’t know if it was for the beauty of this woman with a major’s star on her shoulder, or for the terrible sight of her bloody, dirty face; maybe it was both. He reached a hand to unfasten her collar. Goose bumps rose all over Kalina, and she nudged her hand a few centimeters closer to the pistol in her belt, but the American only tugged the dog tag from her neck.
They had to wait longer than expected. Enemy tanks and armored convoys thundered endlessly past them. Kalina could feel her body freezing almost solid on the snowy ground. It made her think of a couplet from an old army song, of all things. She’d read the words in an old book on Matrosov: “A soldier lies on the snowy ground / like they lie on white swan down.” The day she received her Ph.D., she’d written the lines in her diary. That had been a snowy night, too. She’d stood in front of the window on the top floor of Moscow State University’s Main Building; that night, the snow really did look like swan down, and through the haze of snow flickered the lights from the thousands of homes of the capital. She’d joined the army the next day.
A jeep stopped not far from them, three NATO officers smoking and conversing inside. But the area around Kalina and the lieutenant was clearing. The two finally rose. They jumped in their own jeep, the lieutenant turned the ignition, and they hurtled along the route planned out earlier. Submachine guns sounded behind them; bullets flew overhead, one shattering a rearview mirror. The jeep whipped into a turn, entering a burning residential area. The enemy hadn’t pursued.