The rear tanks now overtook the ones that had halted to fire their howitzers. They churned forward fifty yards in the snow before they, too, stopped and fired. Petr ducked his head just before a window beside him exploded into deadly shrapnel. He hadn’t yet fired to give away his position. But the seasoned panzer crews weren’t taking any chances. They preemptively destroyed any building that might hide an antitank gun or rifle.
They were veterans. But so was Petr. Another window exploded far from Petr. The enemy’s own trick of burrowing through the wall had worked. Nonetheless Petr didn’t feel safe. Every instinct in his body screamed for him to run. It was only a matter of time before the panzers would fire into the walls, too. But Petr didn’t run. His body shivered uncontrollably from fear. He clenched his teeth, but that only made him shake even harder.
Another shell exploded, and suddenly Petr fought the urge to piss. He had to run out back, where it was safer, and find some ditch to piss in. But that would mean running, would mean giving up his position. This was the only two-story building in the village, other than the church, and the church was on fire. The log house’s height was his only advantage. If the tanks got close enough, if he could angle a shot down through the weak armor of a turret hatch, he could kill a commander.
Petr pissed himself instead. He’d heard stories of soldiers pissing themselves out of fear. But in this moment Petr knew those stories were false. You didn’t piss yourself from fear; you pissed yourself from courage.
The rear tanks had started moving again. They passed the front tanks, drove for another fifty yards, and halted to fire. This is how it would be, Petr realized, until they were right on top of him. Only half the tanks would move at any one time, the other half covering their advance with howitzers and machine guns. It was like watching a giant mechanical game of leapfrog.
Smoke was everywhere—smoke from the guns, smoke from the explosions, smoke from the panzers’ exhaust. Then Petr noticed movement in the smoke and heard barking. It was the dogs, leaping through the snow toward the panzers. Petr held his breath, anticipating the carnage when the tank crews opened up with their front machine guns. There was absolutely no cover in the open field, and the charging dogs would be cut down in seconds. Yet those machine guns remained silent.
The dogs on all fours were barely half as tall as a running man. The viewports and periscopes had trouble spotting them. Between that and all the smoke, the dogs were effectively invisible. Petr felt proud and ashamed all at once. He’d been wrong to question Red Army tactics and even more wrong to refuse to arm Duck’s explosives. The mine dogs would work. They outnumbered the panzers two to one. They’d destroy the tanks, the village would be secured, and Petr would live after all.
Then the dogs reached the lead panzers, and everything went wrong.
The dogs had been trained on Russian tanks, not German ones. Russian tanks ran on diesel fuel, not gasoline like the panzers. That fact confused the dogs. The German panzers looked like the tanks the dogs were used to. They were big and metal. But they didn’t smell like tanks because they didn’t smell of diesel fuel. And there was another odor, the smell of gunpowder. The dogs recognized that smell. Their handlers smelled like that. Maybe their handlers were somewhere inside these panzers? The dogs didn’t attack the tanks the way they were expected to; they didn’t run under the tanks. Instead, they hesitated and ran around and around them, like sheepdogs herding giant robots.
One dog slipped on a patch of ice next to the panzer it was stalking. As it rolled onto its back, the wooden stake tied to it triggered its explosives. The dog died instantly, and although the resulting explosion didn’t destroy the panzer, it did split the tank’s treads, immobilizing it.
That got the Germans’ attention.
Suddenly the tank crews noticed the dogs and realized the threat. They opened up with their machine guns.
But the dogs were inside the German ranks now. They wove in and out between the panzers, hard to track and even harder to hit. Some of the dogs ran for cover under the panzers, finally fulfilling their destinies by blowing themselves up. Two tanks exploded.
Now the panzer hatches popped open. Commanders showed their heads, then their torsos, from their top hatches, yelling at the machine gunners and leaning over to point out the canine targets.
Petr pulled the trigger of his PTRD.
A commander’s head exploded. A gruesome sight. Petr hadn’t considered what a slug from his big PTRD rifle would do to human flesh and bone. He wanted to vomit. He squeezed his eyes shut to flush the image from his memory, but he couldn’t, so he reimagined it—that was no human head; it was a melon. They were all melons, put on a fence for target practice. He was shooting the melons with his uncle’s shotgun.
Petr slid the bolt, rechambered a round, and fired, again and again. More melons exploded.
Petr wasn’t shivering anymore. He was calm, going about his business, doing his job. He was still afraid, but what he was doing felt more important than fear. He was defending the dogs, defending Duck, defending a friend.
He should be moving, though. He had been trained to move after every shot so he wouldn’t be killed by return fire, but there was no return fire, at least not yet. There was too much confusion among the panzer crews. And Petr knew in his gut this was a unique opportunity, one he had to take advantage of. Not every one of his bullets hit; he wasn’t that good. But if he could destroy enough melons, perhaps the panzers would be forced to turn around.
The panzers never turned around. The dogs had stopped exploding, the survivors having faulty demolitions or, perhaps like Duck, overly sympathetic handlers. Now the panzer crews were realizing the dogs were no longer a threat. The real danger was that marksman in the log house.
Machine-gun fire raked the log-house wall. Petr couldn’t see the howitzer barrels swinging in his direction, but he sensed it. He abandoned the heavy PTRD rifle and leaped from the loft to the sawdust-covered plank floor.
He landed on his side, flattening his arm under his ribs and the cold, hard surface hammering his ear, which felt like getting smashed with a red-hot skillet. He’d lost his wind and lay gasping, unmoving, on the floor.
The wall behind him exploded. The thick logs transformed into thousands of flying splinters, some as long and thick as his arms. But the angle of the burst sent them flying over the top of him, missing his curled body altogether.
Petr unfolded himself, scrambled to his feet, and stumbled out of the log house as the entire structure collapsed behind him.
The center of the village was largely still intact. Red Army soldiers surrounded the interior cottages, finding shelter from German small-arms fire behind fences or the dead bodies of their fallen comrades. A few managed to cut through the frozen ground and dig shallow foxholes. But they were at a stalemate, unable to advance farther. Petr knew the stalemate was about to be broken. It was only a matter of minutes before the tanks would resume their advance, roll through the village, and cut down the Russian infantry from behind.
Petr started calling for Duck. If the big wolf dog were still alive, Petr didn’t want to leave him to the mercy of the Germans. But he didn’t stop moving, either, running, half crouched, through cottages and leaping over the bodies of dead Russians and Germans. He couldn’t go back the way he’d come; the German attack would take that route in an effort to cut off the Russian retreat. He couldn’t escape through the field; that ran straight into the guns of the panzers. But there was another way. The village was built beside a river that it used to channel water for irrigation. If the river was frozen hard enough, it just might provide an escape.