Dimitri eyed the laden commissars, he was the first to traipse to the nearest one. He leaned down to take a bottle by the neck out of the box. The bottle was corked by a bit of rag.
‘Courage!’ the commissar bellowed at Dimitri, as though the two were on opposite sides of a field. Dimitri held the bottle up by the neck like a chicken for dinner.
‘Courage,’ he echoed and walked off.
Sasha appeared from somewhere in the night - Dimitri stayed close only to his tank, casting his senses out to the battlefield, to the dark sunflower field on the valley floor - and slid down beside him. The boy was freckled and orange-cast and wrapped white, grinning bravely through his pain. Dimitri handed the warm glass over. The two sat listening to the keening commissar.
A crowd of the tankers gathered around the man, perhaps a hundred.
They came for the bottles and stayed in the commissar’s net. None of these boys had been in the fight for Kursk yet, Dimitri could see it on them.
They were frightened and needy of the commissar’s calls for bravado, they did not know yet what they would do today. Great things, the commissar told them, great things, and Dimitri knew this to be true, because living through today or dying in these flowers and grainfields would be remembered as great.
Dimitri and Sasha shared the bottle, neither speaking when the commissar called into the center of his gathered ring the young lieutenant from 3rd Mechanized Corps and the battle for the Oboyan road, the commander of the tank General Platov. The Germans were stopped on the road to Oboyan and they would not pass to Prokhorovka, the Lieutenant told them. He was cheered with Urrabs, clapping, and lifted bottles. Thick Pasha was one of the applauders, his coveralls dirtier than any of the others standing around him.
Valentin reached into his breast pocket for a folded sheet of paper.
This was something official, a communiqué from headquarters. A new duty, Dimitri thought. Splendid. We don’t have enough to do today.
‘We will face a powerful German force today,’ Valya announced, rattling the page as if the paper meant something that could equal a man’s life. ‘We have orders not to budge away from the Prokhorovka road. There will be no retreat today. There will be only victory.’
The men cheered again. They don’t know, Dimitri thought, and turned to see the same high spirits on Sasha’s tired face. The cheers put a mad taste in his mouth and he sipped more vodka to wash it away. Valentin let the tankers roar their approval that they should die today. Dimitri paid little attention, hearing nothing new from the mouth of a Soviet.
Valya told them what was on the sheet, what they would be facing today: three highly trained and veteran SS divisions. These were men and weapons diverted from the assault on the Oboyan road where they could not break through. Now they would try the way through Prokhorovka. They will have with them fifty-seven assault guns and two hundred and thirty-six tanks. Ninety-one of the tanks will be Mark IVs, and fifteen will be Mark VI Tigers.
Where did the Red Army get these facts and figures, Dimitri marveled, how could they be this exact? He hoisted his bottle and tapped the lip of it to an invisible drinking partner, toasting whoever was responsible for this kind of precision. That’s why we’re here, he thought, the Soviets have lined up every tank and gun they could scrounge in front of the damn SS. That kind of information was worth its weight in gold. Not that it will save any lives, but it was damn impressive.
Valya described the size and power of the Tiger tank. Red Army Headquarters had determined that a priority target for the battle of Prokhorovka was the Mark VI Tigers. Every Soviet tank was to find and wipe out every Tiger they could. Valentin reminded the men of their training, to approach the Mark VI from the sides, to attack it with numbers in your favor, to aim for the treads first to disable the mammoth, then move in for the kill.
Valentin pocketed the paper. This brought the commissar back to his side. Another, final round of urrahs rang from the crowd for the young hero of Oboyan, and soon, of Prokhorovka.
* * * *
July 12
0630 hours
He was in his driver’s seat when the first German fighters swooped past.
His head ached a little from the dawn vodka. The day grew fat with humidity and he sat swiping beads from his forehead, slinging them off his fingers out his open hatch. When he saw the first black blurs his hand froze, as though waving hello to them.
One flight of three fighters roared by wing-to-wing without firing a round, then were followed by another flight. The planes dove in low formation, then carved away into sharp banks. They were remarkably swift, beautiful even. Dimitri shook his headache at war in the sky; when he was a boy the skies were blue and black and gray, they were birds and constellations and mansions of cloud and the place where God lived. But never again would children know that kind of sky, war was in it now, and war was out on the ocean, too, and under the water, and one day it will be in the stars, he knew. Wherever men go, we’ll take death with us. Dimitri thought of Katya and imagined her a star pilot flying a machine he could not envision. A rocket, perhaps, free and fast like she always was.
Sasha burrowed up from his escape hatch between the treads.
Behind, Pasha tumbled in the commander’s hatch, cursing the planes.
Valentin, his other child, did not follow. He’s probably getting one last round of inspiration from the commissars, Dimitri decided. He ogled another line of streaking black Messerschmidts and was glad to be a throwback warrior, even riding a steel horse. This was his place; it was enough to know that these things in the sky and sea and one day the stars belonged to others.
He was a Cossack plainsman and had lived all his days true to that.
The countermove arrived inside of a minute. Soviet Yak-9s and Lavochkin-5s swept in lower than the German fighters, not afraid of ground fire over their own troops, and climbed up into the Messerschmidts’ bellies.
Like twists of smoke from two different fires they twined and rose off the ground, twirling around each other in a cyclone of wings, chattering machine-guns, and yawping cannons. Dimitri watched them rise, taking their swiping engine noises with them into a backdrop of din and plummeting pieces of themselves he figured would last all day. He scraped another film of sweat off his brow.
For the next hour he told Sasha what he saw in the sky. The boy sat with his chin to his thin chest. Pasha stood in Valentin’s commander’s hatch and watched the action high above for himself, unplugged from the intracom. Pasha did everything now with a stupid and sober eagerness, he’d become a hunting dog. Dimitri talked to Sasha because it kept the two of them from growing frightened. This morning they hadn’t re-filled their resolve from the well of the commissar’s entreaties for courage. They’d filled themselves with vodka instead and were left now with only what they’d started their day with, each other and the remnants of the drink.
Stukas blared their banshee sirens in dives over the villages, copses, and orchards where much of the Soviet armor was lagered. Dimitri didn’t have to count the planes to know there were more than a hundred. This was a major commitment of air power to Prokhorovka, a bad, bad sign of how badly the Germans wanted it today.