The Soviet monster died in less than a beat of a heart when the mine blew the turret open and exploded the ammo inside. The Germans had no time to congratulate themselves before their backs were ripped open by bursts from PPs 41s. The Russian infantry support was catching up, but without the aid of their comrades in the dead tank, the Germans made short work of them. With the aid of the Tiger's hull machine guns, Gus had finally worked the Tiger around where it could trace the enemy's route back.
The Russians hadn't fully exploited the river crossing. One of their tanks had stalled on the underwater bridge, and the others were lined up behind it, trying to push it off of the side when Langer's Tiger came on the scene. The Ivans were being aided in their effort to clear the bridge by Langer, when a round from his 88 blew the stalled tank clear from the bridge. Cursing as he realized his mistake in blasting the sitting duck free so that the others could come on, he fired again at the leading tank, aiming for the treads.
"FIRE!"
The round blew the Russian half on and half off the bridge. The crossing was barred again.
One T-34 after another was knocked out. After they hit the leading tank, he took out the rear. That left eight more stuck in the center, unable to advance or withdraw. One by one they fell prey to the pinpoint fire of the lone Tiger opposing them. The German infantry was mopping up the few Siberians that had managed to get across. No prisoners were taken, they didn't have the time or the men to spare for such niceties. That, along with what their fellows suffered at the hands of the wild Asians, made their choice easy. . . .
The opposite bank of the river burst into flashes of fire and smoke. Shells by the hundreds began to fall among the milling mass of Russian tanks that had been awaiting their turn to line up for the crossing. These monsters had been unable to lend any support to their comrades on the bridge. When Russian intelligence selected this site they did so because of the narrow defile leading to the crossing. It would aid in keeping their vehicles from being spotted from the air or opposite bank. This choice now made the defile a mass grave for hundreds of men as the combined artillery of three German batteries poured onto them. Someone had got through to HQ with the coordinates of the Russian attack, and was now calling down accurate fire on the congested Russian column. This attempt had been stopped, but there would be others.
Three days later, Field Marshal Eric von Man-stein conferred the Knight's Cross on Stabsfeldwebel Langer, commander of the tank crew, and the Iron Cross first class on the rest of the crew.
Hanging the ribbon with its dangling cross around the sergeant's neck, the aristocratic field marshal gave the awardee a long strange look, as if there was something in the man's face that he was supposed to see, but somehow had missed.
The small formation had not been dismissed ten minutes before Gus was trying to sell his medal to a newly arrived member of a supporting Pioneer battalion which had been assigned to their area. Man-fried was ecstatic with the thought of how proud his father would be. Teacher merely gave his to Yuri. The Tatar had been omitted at the ceremony, and Teacher didn't really give a rat's ass for any piece of tin; all he wanted from the war was out.
Autumn soon came with its changing colors and hints of the snow that lay not far behind. The fields and trees were glorious in the kaleidoscope of colors that preceded the advent of the Russian winter.
The Russians continued their attempts to break through the forces on the Dnieper time and again. It seemed that they had a never-ending supply of men and material to throw against the defenders, who had less to resist them with every day. The snows came and gave the landscape a deceptive look of peace and tranquility. The snow, a clean white sheet, covered the horrors of thousands of decaying bodies of men and horses; and it turned the burned-out shells of tanks into small white hills that dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see. . . .
CHAPTER ELEVEN
From that time on, until the first blast of November, they served as a fire brigade in one savage confrontation after another. Twice their Tiger had to be taken in for repairs that they couldn't handle in the fields; once for a complete engine overhaul, and another time to have the transversing rings and rollers replaced. Other than that they had been lucky. But another winter was coming now; and flurries of snow in the morning and evening were harbingers of the white death that would soon sweep down on them. True, they were fairly well outfitted with winter gear and felt boots like those of the Russians, but their equipment wasn't designed with the tolerances of their Soviet counterparts. Their guns would still freeze up, the oil in the breeches would lock solid, trucks and cars that stopped in bad weather would have their blocks frozen solid, and men would die of carbon monoxide poisoning from trying to sleep in their vehicles while keeping the motors running.
The battalion was reformed. The faces of the replacements were younger every year, indeed every month. Faces like Manny's that would soon look older than their years, especially their eyes, old men's eyes in eighteen-year-old faces, Nikopol was to their front about three or four kilometers, and just to the rear was the encampment of the Kalmyks. They, along with Heidemann's unit, had been assigned to the defense of Nikopol. The Kalmyks, along with their families, had fought fiercely alongside the Germans ever since 1942. They hated the Russians with a savagery that even the SS couldn't match.
They had left the Kalmyk steppes, with their wives and families driving their herds of horses before them. Now they served as scouts, and they specialized in rooting out partisans. They had stayed with the 16th Panzers all the way, and thought of the division as their own personal property and family, something to defend at all costs. They, and Heidemann, were under the command of General of Mountain Troops, Ferdinand Schorner.
The German forces held a bridgehead in an arc seventy-five kilometers across. Behind them ran the Dnieper, and on their southern flank was the Plav-na, a swamp covering a larger area than their own perimeter; these swampy lowlands were the haunts of the partisans. Without the aid of the half-savage Kalmyk cavalry units, it would have been almost impossible to control the guerrillas in the morass of reeds and marsh.
Here they waited, fighting and dying until Father Winter finally proclaimed his mastery over the land. The great cold had come, and like the animals, those that could bury themselves in the earth did so to seek whatever shelter and warmth they could. Anything to keep out of the icy wind that froze a man's feet into blackened stumps, and sapped the will to live until one just sat down and quit, waiting for the peace that would come with freezing. Freezing wasn't so bad; the old-timers said that after a while you couldn't feel the cold, and then for a short time you were actually warm, and that was when death would come. . . .
Langer sat, his eyes barely showing over the lip of the open turret hatch, trying to pierce the darkness. They were out there; every instinct told him that they were coming. It had been too quiet for the last few days, only scouting patrols had been intercepted. It was too quiet! Now he took the watch just before the hours of dawn, Ivan's favorite time to attack. That was when the body in sleep or repose took the longest time to get awake, when seconds meant the difference between life and death. His eyes blanked out. "Flares!"