The sounds reached him split seconds later, but he was already inside the hatch. The Russian barrage lit up the night, one long continuous rolling wave of fiery destruction. It rumbled across the frozen earth. It rolled over them, missing the sitting Tiger. Only the spaaang of ricocheting shrapnel told them how close they had come to being destroyed.
The radio crackled, Heidemann's voice breaking in, "All Panzers, start engines and move out, give support to the infantry, but don't tie yourselves down. If you have to leave them, we can't afford to lose any more armor. This is the Breakout: follow plan 'C' to rendezvous; you're on your own, Ivan is hitting us too." The crackling of the radio stopped, there was no need for anything more to be said.
General Schorner had been expecting this, and contrary to Hitler's orders of "Fight to the last man," he preferred to risk his own life and disobey the suicide orders to save his men. Strangely enough, the order for Breakout was, "Ladies, excuse me, please."
From the north, General Chuykov's 8th Guards Army assaulted the rear of the bridgehead. It was the night of 31 January.
Langer's Tiger patrolled like a hungry wolf between the retreating German forces and the Russians hounding them, trying to keep the Soviet armor off their back until they could break contact. Four times they had sent screeching rounds into advancing Russian tanks, sending them and their crews to eternity.
Everything was in confusion until they could join the main force between the river and Apostolovo. There the situation stabilized, as the German units added their strength to those already there. The uncommon warm spell of the last week had turned the ground from ice to the knee-deep clinging mud that bogged down tanks and trucks. Infantrymen had to tie strips of canvas around their legs to keep their boots from being pulled off by the sucking mud.
Exhausted men, who could go no further, died from suffocation when they fell face first into it, sinking out of sight so that their bodies were not seen by those who marched over them.
Langer wrapped his olive-colored scarf around his lower mouth and nose, leaving only the eyes exposed to the whipping, icy wind. Outside the bunker, the shock of the cold snatched his breath. The whirling winds of snow had covered everything in a clean blanket of virgin white that covered, at least for the time, the horrors that lay beneath them. A distant flickering in the sky lit up the darkness, like a burning star. . . .
Flares. The storm was no guarantee that Ivan wouldn't come across the frozen fields. The temperature had dropped from twenty above to forty below zero. He had seen a snap freeze like this once before, during the retreat from Moscow, the cold that comes so fast that you don't know that it's killing you.
He had come upon a small group of Cossacks. The snow was waist high, and several were mounted. For a moment, he started to fire, until he saw that there were no frozen wisps of breath coming from them, or their animals. One of the riders held a cigaret in hand, head bending over slightly, ready to light it with a match that had blown away. All were dead in the act of living. Langer figured that it had happened three days earlier, when a snap freeze came across the plains from Siberia.
That, with the seventy-mile-an-hour winds, brought a chill factor of over a hundred below zero, so cold that it froze the fluids servicing the brain. It came fast, the white death, so fast that you never knew it. As you were, so you died, asleep or awake. This night was like that, not as cold perhaps, but cold enough to kill over a thousand men on both sides before the dawn would come.
Small flickers in the night showed where crews of tanks built small fires under their vehicles to keep the engines from freezing solid. Antifreeze didn't help. Machine gunners heated bricks red hot and put them on the breeches of the weapons to prevent them from locking up if they had to be used. The bricks had to be changed every ten minutes.
Heaving his way through the knee-deep white, breath laboring and aching, he looked for Manny, trying to find his bearings to the outpost. It was only a hundred and fifty meters from the bunker, but it took over twenty minutes to make it, fighting the wind and drifts.
Stooping over, he moved the canvas covering aside, letting a blast of arctic air enter with him. The wind almost blew out the tin-can stove which served only to keep the worst of the cold out. Gus grumbled at the incursion; he was at the aperture, searching out the Russian side of the field through a pair of artillery range-finding glasses. The opening was packed with rags around the lenses, which he had to wipe off every couple of minutes to keep them from icing up.
"Goddamn, Sarge, it's about time! Where is Manny? I thought that he was supposed to relieve me!"
"He never showed?"
Concern erased Gus's habitual cynicism. "No, he hasn't been here. Then he's still out there!" Gus started to move past Langer and was stopped by a gloved hand.
"No, you stay here. I'll backtrack and see if I can find him. Maybe he holed somewhere with another crew. You stay and keep an eye on the front, unless you feel a desire to have the Siberians play games with you. Remember Moscow. . . ."
Unwillingly, Gus conceded and returned to the lenses. "Find him, Carl, please."
That was the first time, the only time, that Langer had ever heard Gus say please to anyone.
Back in the dark, the wind was trying to cut through to the skin. Ice built up on his eyebrows and collected in the hair of his lids, trying to squeeze them shut and close them forever, as it had done to so many others in this waste of frozen nightmares.
CRUMP! CRUMP! The dull thumping explosions of incoming mortar rounds walked over the earth. linger threw himself beside a broken tree, sinking down, face forward, into the drift built around the base of the tree the height of a man's waist.
The barrage walked on searching out anything it could kill. Langer rose to his knees, lungs aching, and leaned against the trunk of the shell-wrecked tree.
Something in the shape of the drift piled up on the base of the tree bothered him. A fresh burst of wind came across the fields from the north. A gust blew past his face and whipped at the drift he was looking at, blowing a piece of crust off the top. A helmet top. A coldness gripped his insides, but it wasn't caused by the wind. Using his glove, he wiped away the snow from the helmet and face, knowing what he would find, but hoping that he was wrong. Manny's face stared out from its glowing white cover. The eyes were wide open, his face calm, no trace of fear or of anxiety, looking as if he had just stopped to rest and think for a moment and was forever frozen in that state. Ice crusted around his eyes and mouth made him look older than his nineteen years. Langer moved the rest of the snow from him and picked up what used to be Manfried Ertl. The body was frozen solid in the sitting position. Langer struggled back to the bunker carrying his burden; the wind blew on, uncaring. Manfried was of no importance, only one more to be added to the roll call of the greatest of Russian killers— General Winter. Laying his burden on the snow on its side by the bunker, Langer went inside. There was no need to bring Manny in to thaw. The cold would keep him until they could bury him.
An infantry company of SS, moving up under the cover of darkness, died in its steps. 155 mm shells set to explode in the air picked their spot to do so directly over the SS men. The concussion killed more than shrapnel. The company looked as if they had just lain down to catch some sleep.