Shilko looked around. Everyone was listening to him, despite the unmistakable tension. The clock showed two minutes to go.
Shilko grinned. “You know what he said to me? He leaned over that desk, so close I could see the old scars on his cheek, and he half whispered, ‘Shilko, wars are not won by the most competent army — they are won by the least incompetent army.’ “
His audience responded with pleasant laughter. But the undercurrent of anticipation had grown so intense now that no man could fully master it. The tension seemed almost like a physical wave, rising to sweep them all away.
Romilinsky gripped the field telephone, ready.
Less than one minute to go.
In the distance, a number of guns sounded, startling in the perfect stillness. Someone had fired early, either because of a bad clock or through nervousness.
Shilko looked at the clock one final time. Other batteries and full battalions took up the challenge of the first lone battery, rising to a vast orchestra of calibers. Shilko turned to Romilinsky, utterly serious now.
“Give the order to open fire.”
Four
Junior Lieutenant Plinnikov wiped at his nose with his fingers and ordered his driver forward. The view through the vehicle commander’s optics allowed no meaningful orientation. Rapid flashes dazzled in the periscope’s lens, leaving a deep gray veil of smoke in their wake. The view was further disrupted by raindrops that found their way under the external cowl of the lens block. Plinnikov felt as though he were guiding his reconnaissance track through hell at the bottom of the sea.
The shudder of the powerful artillery bursts reached through the metal walls of the vehicle. Suddenly, the armor seemed hopelessly thin, the tracks too weak to hold, and the automatic cannon little more than a toy. Occasionally, a tinny sprinkling of debris struck the vehicle, faintly audible through Plinnikov’s headset and over the engine whine. He could feel the engine pulling, straining to move the tracks through the mud of the farm trail.
“Comrade Lieutenant, we’re very close to the barrage,” his driver told him.
Plinnikov understood that the driver meant too close. But the lieutenant was determined to outperform every other reconnaissance platoon leader in the battalion, if not in the entire Second Guards Tank Army.
“Keep moving,” Plinnikov commanded, “just keep moving. Head straight through the smoke.”
The driver obeyed, but Plinnikov could feel his unwillingness through the metal frame that separated them. For a moment, Plinnikov took his eyes away from the periscope and looked to the side, checking on his gunner. But Belonov was all right, eyes locked to his own periscope. Three men in a rolling steel box. There was no margin of safety in personnel now; everyone had to do his job without fail. Plinnikov had never received the additional soldiers required to fill out his reconnaissance platoon for war, and he had no extra meat, no dismount strength in his own vehicle. As it was, he could barely man the essential positions in each of his three vehicles.
It was impossible to judge the exact location of his vehicle now. If everything was still on track, his second vehicle would be tucked in behind him, with Senior Sergeant Malyarchuk to the rear in an over-watch position. Plinnikov laughed to himself. Overwatch. You couldn’t see ten meters. He glanced at his map, anxious to orient himself.
He could feel the trail dropping toward a valley or ravine. Artillery rounds struck immediately to the front.
“Keep going,” Plinnikov said. “Get down into the low ground. Stay on the trail as long as the smoke holds. Fast now, move.”
Plinnikov sensed that they were very close to the enemy. Clots of earth and stone flew into the air, hurtling across his narrowed horizon. Plinnikov guessed that, if he moved off the trail, there might be mines, but that the trail itself would only be covered by direct fires — which would be ineffective in the confusion of the Soviet artillery preparation.
“Lieutenant, we’re catching up with the barrage. We’re too close.”
“Keep going. We’re already in it. Go right through.”
“Comrade Lieutenant…” It was Junior Sergeant Belonov, his gunner and assistant. The boy’s face was milky.
“It’s all right,” Plinnikov told him through the intercom. “Just spot for targets. If we wait and try to sneak through, they’ll get us for sure.”
An unidentified object thumped against the vehicle so hard that the vehicle jolted, as though wincing in pain.
“Go faster,” Plinnikov shouted to the driver. “Just stay on the road and go as fast as you can.”
“I can’t see the road. I lose it.”
“Just go.” Plinnikov brushed his fingers at his nose. He felt fear rising in his belly and chest, unleashed by the impact of whatever had hit the vehicle.
Suddenly, the artillery blasts seemed to swamp them, shaking the vehicle like a boat on rough water. Plinnikov realized that if they threw a track now, they were dead.
“Go, damn you.”
In the thick smoke, the lights of the blasts seemed demonic, alive with deadly intentions.
“More to the left… to the left.”
The tracks seemed to buckle on the edge of a ditch or gully, threatening to peel away from the road wheels.
“Target,” Plinnikov screamed.
But the sudden black shape off to their right side was lifeless, its metal deformed by a direct hit. The driver swerved away, and the tracks came level, back on the trail again.
Plinnikov broke out in a sweat. He had not seen the shattered vehicle until they almost collided with it. He wondered, for the first time, if he had not done something irrevocably foolish.
Slop from a nearby impact smacked the external lens of Plinnikov’s periscope, cracking it diagonally, just as the vehicle reached a pocket where the wind had thinned the smoke to a transparent gauze. Several dark shapes moved out of the smoke on a converging axis.
“Targets. Gunner, right. Driver, pull left now.”
But the enemy vehicles moved quickly away, either uninterested in or unaware of Plinnikov’s presence. The huge armored vehicles disappeared back into the smoke, black metal monsters roaming over the floor of hell. None of the turrets turned to fight.
“Hold fire.”
The enemy were evidently pulling off of a forward position. The fire was too much for them. Plinnikov tried his radio, hoping the antenna had not been cut away.
“Javelin, this is Penknife. Do you hear me?”
Nothing.
The heaviest fire struck behind them now. But the smoke, mingled with the fog and rain, still forced them to drive without points of orientation. Plinnikov worried because he had once turned in a complete circle in a smokescreen on a training exercise, in the most embarrassing experience of his brief career. He could still hear the laughter and the timeworn jokes about lieutenants.