Russian T-34s closed from the left, maybe twenty of them remained, running hard. The Reds were paying a flaming wage for getting close enough to enter their own effective range, but in moments their shells would start to take the toll on the stationary SS tanks arrayed across the slope. In the valley, what looked like two regiments of Soviet armor coursed through the sunflower field.
Their lead formations were probably eighteen hundred meters away and charging at top overland speed.
We don’t have time to sit on this slope, he thought. We can’t stay still and take potshots, we’ll be up to our asses in Red tanks. They’ll slam into us, we’ll have no room to maneuver, with T-34s on three sides. And we will not go backward.
He watched the Red tanks crush the gold on their side of the valley, pushing into it fast, killing the color. They wore broken yellow petals and severed brown irises across their fenders in ugly spangles. This stoked something in Luis, the last bit of him, bleeding, maddened, hungry all of a sudden, blazing into hatred.
‘Radio.’
‘Ja.’
‘Tell the company to follow. Driver, forward. Mack schnell.’
Luis stood in the turret while the Tiger, his company, and then the entire regiment followed his command. Luis felt bold; the wound throbbed in his jaw but it was his throb, there was nothing foreign, no infestation of others in his soul now. He felt the black wooden block of the faraway map room slide forward, slide into this yellow valley that he knew was drawn blue and white on the giant map. He sensed the red blocks sliding to meet him across the table. But there were no long poles pushing them at each other.
No, it was Luis making this happen. Let Breit and Grimm and Hitler and the Americans and the world watch Luis Ruiz de Vega go forward, and know that all of them, everything, were impelled by his will alone.
Slowly, then faster, the sixty-seven tanks of Leibstandarte gave up the ridge and lowered to the valley floor. The Soviet tanks merged into the field with the Germans. The battleground was level and bright, for these first moments a clean slate of gold.
Luis rode high on the Tiger. He watched the picket of sunflowers approach and succumb beneath his tank. He heard the crunch of snapping stalks and ignored it. He cared nothing for the field. It was land to be taken.
They were Russian sunflowers. Not Spanish. Not gold.
* * * *
CHAPTER 29
July 12
0909 hours
sunflower field
3 kilometers west of Prokhorovka
Dimitri could stand no more blindness, ramming his way through the green and saffron fatness of the sunflowers. He tore forward in the center of a great cavalry charge, into an enemy he had not caught sight of. Only Valentin in his turret could see where this Soviet attack was going, Dimitri could only tell how fast. Beside him, Sasha peered into his own vision block, blotted out by the same crashing field. The full-out sprint inside the General had turned claustrophobic, it was down to shuddering metal painted mint green, glass dials, levers, pedals, jiggling ammunition, diesel stink, unseeing men inside speeding steel. Who makes war like this, Dimitri marveled, who in the world? Only us, Russia. Always numbers, blindfolded numbers.
Dimitri had been catapulted into this valley like a lifeless cannonball, not a man entering battle, and he would have no more of it. Without an order from Valya, he angled the General to the right, easing sideways until he found the wake of another T-34 racing twenty meters ahead. He laid his own spinning treads into the tracks of that tank and followed, to see better where he was going. Valentin’s boots did not prevent him.
Dimitri blinked into his periscope. The tank ahead boosted flowers and fumes into the air, but for the first time in the attack he could see beyond his own fenders. The opposite slope of the valley dodged in and out of view. His visor shook with the jangling pace. In the glimpses he got of the far side, he noted tread scratches and shell craters in the brush and grasses there. Lots of German tanks had sat on that slope a minute before.
How many? Several dozens, fifty at least, their marks covered the whole ridge. There’d been a short firefight. Perhaps the SS had withdrawn in the face of the Red onslaught, maybe they’ve gone back over the ledge in retreat. That’s why we’re hauling so fast, he thought. To catch the Germans.
Maybe we won’t have to fight in this yellow hell.
His answer came in a trumpeting clout against his tank’s momentum, the sound like a lightning slash through the General’s cabin. His head and shoulders jolted to the impact, back into Valentin’s boots, he bit into his lip, his goggles were knocked askew. Both steering rods snapped out of his grip. The General careened. Smoke shot in around his hatch.
‘Papa!’ Valya’s scream was small in the turmoil.
Dimitri felt turned upside down, he could not stop blinking and gaping.
Sasha was frantically trying to corral the free-flopping levers. Dimitri grabbed the boy by the scruff of his coveralls and flung him back into his own seat. He surrounded the levers with fists and gathered them in, grunting with the dizzy effort.
‘What happened?’ Pasha had been shouting this the whole time, Dimitri realized. ‘Are we hit? What happened?’
‘The shell deflected,’ Valentin answered. ‘It deflected. We’re alright.
Everyone, lock in. Calm down. Papa?’
The round must have hit the slanted glacis plate right in front of Dimitri’s head. The armor held; the tread links the mechanic welded there had probably saved all their lives. Dimitri worked his tongue over his cut lip, the dash of pain yanked him alert. He regained control of the reeling tank.
‘Papa.’
‘What?’
‘They’re in the field with us.’
The tank’s ventilation system dragged at the strata of smoke between them. Sasha trained bugging eyes on Dimitri, then thrust them into his vision block. He put his hands on his machine-gun. The boy coughed and muttered, ‘Son of a bitch.’
Dimitri righted his goggles and muscled the tank forward, straight and fast as before. He waited for Valentin to give the order to stop, to train their big gun on whoever was shooting at them. But Valya kept the General charging ahead. Dimitri leaned in to his visor; he’d lost sight of the tanks ahead of him; after the blow the General must have spun out of formation.
He was blind again, bolting through sunflowers.
Why are the Germans down in the valley with us? he wondered. They never do this, they don’t give up the advantage of their cannons. They’ve got discipline, they sit outside our range and pummel us, make us run under their stronger guns for a thousand meters before we can even squeeze off the first round. By the time we get close enough to hurt them, we’re slaughtered. Why are they in these damned flowers with us and not up on that ledge? Something is making them hasty. Something’s happened to their timetable.
Christ, Dimitri thought, Christ. This isn’t how tanks fight. How close are we going to get?
Again, as it had done moments before, the battle answered his question.