Bezarin’s handful of tanks shot their way onto the high ground south of Bad Oeynhausen with their last rounds. One last, vital time they managed to surprise the enemy, and they caught a series of tank and infantry fighting vehicle positions in the rear. The enemy vehicles had been positioned so that they could kill anything that tried to cross the main highway bridge to the north. But they had become so preoccupied with that task that they had totally neglected the possibility of a threat from behind their positions. Bezarin’s tanks destroyed every enemy vehicle on the hill.
Hurriedly, he radioed Dagliev to tell everyone in the bridgeheads to hold their fire. Then he split his tiny force in two, leaving half of it to hold the high ground and taking what amounted to a platoon of tanks down the hill toward the big bridge, firing colored flares to indicate to the air-assault troops that his was a Soviet force. Some small-arms fire came his way, despite his precautions, but it only managed to force Bezarin back inside the turret.
Dagliev had moved his tanks over the bridge as soon as he saw the firefight on the high ground, and he awaited Bezarin just off the western approach to the bridge. The air-assault unit commander came out to meet Bezarin as well. The officers hugged each other, oblivious to the nearby impact of artillery rounds that a single day before would have sent them scrambling for cover. Dagliev looked filthy, even in the darkness, covered with oil and the residue of gunnery. The air-assault lieutenant colonel looked even worse, grimed with blood, soot, and mud. It was all very much unlike the movies about the Great Patriotic War in terms of glamorous appearance, Bezarin thought. But the emotional power seemed incomparably greater.
The air-assault commander was disappointed to learn how few tanks Bezarin had with him, and he was alarmed to hear that they were virtually out of ammunition. But Bezarin felt confident. Surely, the enemy had received reports that Soviet tanks had entered Bad Oeynhausen. That would slow down any planned countermeasures until the enemy assessed the impact of the change in the situation.
Bezarin ordered Dagliev to recross to the east bank and block any enemy counterattacks from that direction, then he returned to properly position his remaining tanks against a threat from the south or west. Small-arms engagements continued to flare in the center of the town, but the noise did not seem to worry the air-assault commander. The bridge, after all, was everything.
Now it was a matter of waiting to see who would arrive first, an enemy counterattack or formations of Soviet armor. Bezarin expected more high drama, perhaps even a sort of siege. But reality disappointed him. More small Soviet elements began to filter in, while some reconnaissance elements pushed on to the west. Another forward detachment found its way through, and its commander was disappointed that Bezarin had beaten him to the linkup. Regimental forward security detachments and advance guards arrived, often with vehicles from different units jumbled together. Lead elements from an army corps appeared, demanding that their vehicles receive unconditional right-of-way. The orders of march often made little sense, judged by the prescriptions of the manuals. But within an hour, enough combat power had crossed the Bad Oeynhausen bridge to hold the area against any counterattack the enemy was likely to launch. When Bezarin reestablished radio contact with his elements left behind at Rinteln, he learned that other Soviet units were crossing there, as well.
Mission accomplished, Bezarin attempted to make out his after-action report, huddled in the stinking interior of his tank. He felt a desperate need to explain the day’s events from the perspective of his battalion. He was unsure whether he was a hero or a war criminal. He intended to be as honest as possible about the situation that had gotten out of hand during the engagement amid the refugee column. He wanted to get it out in the open. He did not intend to live with it as a secret, like one of the tormented characters in Anna’s beloved novels. In any case, he doubted that it would be possible to hide it. It was too big, too terrible. He remembered the girl in the torn sweater, how her arm had flown high over a spray of blood in the moment before she fell. In his imagination, he could see each of her bony fingers, reaching higher and higher, even though she had been too far away for him actually to have made out the fine details he now traced in his mind. Then the fleeing girl was Anna, reaching to touch the coppery leaves of a birch tree in the Galician autumn, and it all made perfect sense to him as he fell into an iron sleep.
Twenty
Chibisov felt the strain of the war in his lungs. The days and nights of near-sleeplessness and the stress involved in maintaining the objective conditions for troop control as NATO pounded away at the front’s infrastructure had clamped his asthma around his chest like a shrinking jacket of steel. He had already taken twice the allowed dosage of his East German medications, but he continued to feel as though his body constantly remained several breaths behind its real need. He worried that his powers of thought would deteriorate to a dangerous degree, that illness would rob him of his focus. Already, he had been forced by the crush of events to make decisions for the commander that would have been unthinkable just days before, despite the level of trust between the two of them. The staffs ability to function had been terribly shaken. In two days, Chibisov had learned to make drastic, immediate choices in Malinsky’s absence, making decisions that killed numbers still uncounted, judging only by the powerful law of the plan and his insights into Malinsky’s approach to military operations. Sequential and even concurrent methods of support for decision-making and planning had largely broken down. The truly crucial decisions had to be made upon the immediately available information in the executive manner. Under the circumstances, Chibisov did his best to be a perfect chief of staff and deputy commander for the old man, struggling not to insert his personal views, always seeking to act as a pure extension of the commander’s will. But now Chibisov worried that he might make a false move out of the sort of temperamental spitefulness that sickness brought out in the human animal.
He had not been outside the bunker since the beginning of combat operations. Malinsky flew around the battlefield, applying his personal skills and attention at the points of decision, while Chibisov remained at the main command post, working the routine levers and gears. Chibisov had no doubt that Malinsky’s presence forward made a difference. The old man had the knack, the touch of the born general, able to see through the fog of war to the essence. Perhaps, Chibisov thought, there was something to bloodlines. Perhaps all of the centuries of family soldiering had made this difference in Malinsky, breeding a special, ultimately undefinable perfection in the man.
Chibisov smiled bitterly at the shortness in his lungs. Yes, and if bloodlines determined fate, then what did that imply for him? A little Jew from the ghetto of Kiev or Odessa, sputtering the arcane formulas of a new metal religion. Worshiping the correlation of forces and means, the norms of consumption and the mathematical coefficients of combat results. He sensed that he was, after all, an impostor. How could he be otherwise? How could any of them have been otherwise? His father had fought for the Soviet Union and the international cause of socialism in Spain, and had nearly died in Stalin’s camps for his suspicious voluntarism within a viciously capricious system. Only the German invasion had saved the man from death in the snows of Magadan. As with Malinsky’s father, Chibisov well knew. And he laughed. What would the Hitlerite Germans have thought had they known that their invasion actually freed Jews? To fight them from Maikop to Potsdam. Jews who would have sons to fight their sons.