Last Citadel - [World War II 03] (57 page)

The guards fired after the partisans for seconds but hit none of them through the dust billows rising behind the horses. Katya kept her eyes on fading Nikolai and, farther to the north, Breit, doing his best to stay in the saddle.

She pulled alongside Josef.

‘Give me my pistol!’ she shouted.

Josef glanced past his bouncing shoulder at the receding village, at Filip. He reached into his waistband and took out her gun. He handed it over across the bounding neck of his own horse.

‘Go get the prisoner!’

Katya cut her eyes to Nikolai, then to Breit. She could catch either of them easily.

Josef shouted again, reading her expression.

‘We have orders, Witch! The German!’

‘No!’

Old dark Josef took one more look over his shoulder, to the little house where the brave
starosta
clutched him and spoke his last wish. He’d heard Filip’s last bloody whisper, the traitorous twin Nikolai’s name, and what else?

Katya turned to wheel her horse away Nikolai and Breit grew more distant by the second.

Josef looked out to Nikolai. There was no more time to choose between vendetta and his orders.

‘Go!’ Josef shouted. ‘I’ll deal with fucking Plokhoi. Go!’

‘Take care of Leonid! I’ll catch you!’

With that, Katya yanked Lana’s head around. The horse responded like a
dzhigitka
mount, digging in her hooves and whirling quick and nimble. Katya clamped tight with her thighs and struck a furious pace straight at Nikolai. She tucked herself low over Lana’s lathering neck, clicking and urging the horse, ‘
Tick, tick, hiya!’
absorbing the pumping and pounding of the animal, swelling with it to do the murder that grew closer with every reach of Lana’s long strides.

Katya snared one last glimpse of the prisoner Breit off to her right. The man was a terrible rider, he bounced like he was on a camel. She could have run circles around him. But as clumsy a horseman as the German was, he’d put enough distance between him and Katya speeding the other direction to disappear over a low rise in the steppe, and he was gone.

I hope you are a spy, Katya thought, matching her hips and arms to the rhythm of her sprinting horse. I hope you are and you go to Berlin and you help us. Or I hope your horse steps in a hole and you break your neck. Go, Colonel Breit. Count your blessings.

Katya laid her eyes to the
hiwi
and galloped.

Nikolai saw her coming. He did his best to outrace her but he stood no chance with a Cossack in the coming saddle. Katya closed the distance and there was nothing the
hiwi
could do.

Filip is clan, Katya thought. He took me to Leonid, then he died to save us.

He is clan. This was his wish.

Nikolai, as though hearing her thoughts broadcast over the steppe, reined in his horse. The last hundred meters of grassland rushed beneath her. The pistol in her hand weighed nothing, it was the weight of the life she rode up to, the traitor. Nikolai lifted his hands, surrendering.

‘Witch,’ he pleaded.

Katya gave him no chance to say more. She stopped two meters away and raised the gun. She aimed it into his forehead, into the hawk-nosed face that was Filip’s. This angered her more, that Nikolai should have such a hero’s face. This
hiwi
would not profane that face any longer, and he would not take it with him to Hell. She pulled the trigger.

She circled the fallen body. She looked down, there was no question he was dead. She stuck the warm pistol in her waist and took the reins of Nikolai’s emptied horse, the partisans always needed extra mounts.

She sped off, eager to catch up to Leonid. Nikolai’s horse loped beside her. She bent low over Lana’s mane and let the blowing strands graze her cheeks. The reins felt good in her hands.

She’d killed a man today, a traitor, and attacked another, a German, trying to kill him, too. She spurred the horses away from the twin and the soldier, leaving their corpses well behind. She rode hard for several kilometers until she saw Josef, Ivan, and Leonid in the distance. They’d slowed. None of the enemy garrison from the village pursued them, the German war vehicles could not travel as fast over the roadless Russian steppe as horsemen. Leonid was too beaten to be taken anywhere but back to the partisan cell to rest and heal. Josef would tell Colonel Bad the prisoner Breit had been killed in the action, the German had tried to escape and paid for it. But she had come through. She’d saved Leonid. The spy in their cell, bastard Daniel, was exposed and handed the bill for his treachery, in front of his wife. Filip was old, and he died a memorable way, strong and selfless. A tear cooled in the wind against her cheek. Katya wanted to whoop out loud, a cry for Vera, for Filip.

Instead, she pulled the bandanna out of her hair and threw it away. She tugged the reins of Nikolai’s mount to bring the horse closer alongside Lana. When the two horses were shoulder to shoulder, she pulled her boots from her stirrups, coiled her knees, and leaped to stand, one foot each on the two rocking saddles.

Like this Katya rode past Ivan, Josef, and Leonid. She rode with her bloody arms widespread into the vast and open day.

* * * *

DEATH RIDE

The armored clashes around Prokhorovka have attained almost legendary status as the greatest armored combat of World War II, and perhaps the greatest of all time.

David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House

The Battle of Kursk

The 5th Guards Tank Army delivered a frontal attack against crack German panzer divisions which, without an essential superiority in forces, could at best result in driving the enemy back. Since the Germans in turn were also assembling forces and were preparing to continue their ongoing offensive, a large tank battle was in prospect, which indeed, broke out during the day on 12 July.

Soviet General Staff Study

The Battle for Kursk
, 1943

… Citadel was to be a veritable death ride.

Major General F. W. von Mellenthin

Panzer Battles

* * * *

CHAPTER 22

July 10

1030hours

Hill 256.6

near Teterevino,

alongside the Prokhorovka road

Luis drummed his fingers on the warm metal of the turret. His tapping made no sound he could hear above the thrum of the Tiger’s idling engine.

For minutes he’d been watching the motorcycle courier course from the west across the steppe. On the western approaches to Prokhorovka,
Leibstandarte
’s tanks and grenadiers were finally outside the deep defense works of the Soviets. These fields were untrammeled, a fresh, undulating table without the gargantuan grazes of tank ditches, bunkers, and trenches that marred the lanes to Oboyan.

Luis watched the motorcycle. He grew bored waiting. From his vantage on this hill, he noted how the land fell away to the north, sloping into shallow valleys that shaped the basin of the Psel River. In the eastern distance, close to Prokhorovka, he glimpsed patches of yellow, swaths of sunflowers, vibrant and misfit on this cloudy day.

The motorcycle skidded closer. Luis climbed out of the turret to receive the message standing high on the Tiger. He would not hop down into the mud. He looked at his watch. Damn
Totenkopf
, he thought. They should have taken their objective hours ago. He turned away from the sputtering motorcycle to face north, where
Totenkopf
struggled to cross a bend in the Psel River and overrun a key hill. The Reds were putting up a tough defense in the many small settlements along the riverbank. The sounds of the fighting crackled up from the river basin under a smoky shroud in the hazy late morning.
Totenkopf
was held up on the left flank: This delayed the start of the assault by the other two divisions south of the river,
Das Reich
and
Leibstandarte
. Luis again traveled in his mind back to the dark map room, imagining the long poles waiting to push the three SS blocks eastward. He stood on his tank, idling with the Tiger under his boots and the long poles in his head. The motorcycle rider slid closer in the muck until he rode beneath the fat barrel of the main gun.

Luis leaned down for the message, a yellow sheet folded and taped over. The courier was spattered with mud. The soldier did not wait for Luis to read the note but gunned his throttle and puttered off, spraying the Tiger.

Luis read the two lines of the message. The attack was to resume at 1045 hours. The objectives for his division were to clean out Komsomolets state farm on the Prokhorovka road, then capture Hill 241.6, just east of the town.
Totenkopf
couldn’t be waited on any longer.

He stayed on the shuddering deck alone for another minute, surveying the battlefield. Far to his left flowed the Psel. On the right ran the Prokhorovka road and a parallel railway mound. In between was this long stretch of steppe, an alley about five kilometers wide.

This attack had three prongs:
Totenkopf
to the north across the river,
Das Reich
in the south below the road and rail tracks, and
Leibstandarte
in the middle. The other two divisions had more tanks:
Das Reich
possessed almost seventy tanks,
Totenkopf
over eighty. But theirs were mostly the impotent Mark IIIs.
Das Reich
was left with a dozen and a half Mark IVs and only one Tiger;
Totenkopf
had two dozen Mark IVs and just two Tigers.
Leibstandarte
operated sixty-seven tanks, forty-one of them Mark IVs, and four Tigers. Even though
Leibstandarte
had not fully regrouped after its pivot away from Oboyan, it was still the most potent of the three SS divisions. So it was the force chosen to go up the gut in the onslaught on Prokhorovka.

The mission for
Leibstandarte
was a simple one: Lead the charge to Prokhorovka, and crush everything in the way.
Totenkopf
was already encountering running battles in and out of the small farm villages and river lowlands. In another fifteen minutes when the full attack started,
Das Reich
would have to charge ahead on the other side of the road and rail line, through scattered forests and rolling knolls where the Reds could duck and counter-punch.
Leibstandarte
in the middle stared across a mostly level plain where visibility would be exceptional, where enemies would face little but each other. Luis thought of a bullring, where nothing separated the combatants but their wills to kill and survive. He fingered the hilt of the SS knife at his belt. He searched again for the partisan’s pulse in his hand and found it. He turned to the turret, to the raised hatch cover for the mark of Erich Thoma and found it, too, brown and flaking, no longer blood but like the partisan, a memory of blood.

The fourteen tanks of his company began to jerk forward, firming into their wedges and positions around him, dustless over the damp earth. His own driver waited for his command. The long poles in the faraway map room waited, too. The sunflowers in the gray distance beyond Komsomolets farm called to him. Luis had always liked sunflowers, a very Spanish bloom, evoking long hot days and idleness.

‘
He llegado
,’ he spoke to the Red fighters, the angry host standing hard between him and the sunflowers’ gold.
I have come
. I have come for the honor of the Blue Division. I have come for my father and for Spain. I have come for the lost parts of me.
Soy la Daga
.

* * * *

July 10

1125 hours

The first seconds of the assault stunned him. Cropland and grasses as far as Luis could see, which had been swaying in the dreary wind moments before, now rose together and advanced. Twenty thousand men and weapons, three hundred revving tanks and assault guns, all stirred at once, as though the plates of the earth had shifted; the ground itself seemed to slide forward. The gray-clad grenadier regiments of the three SS divisions put their guns in their hands and their boots into the soil and river and stomped east, over the tracks, across the florid flat steppe. Then came the first flights of air cover. The Luftwaffe’s Henschel 129s droned in slow and wicked, searching for targets in the fields and villages ahead, and above them the sirens of the diving Stukas began to whine in powered dives. There was inconceivable German power concentrated here. The world tilted east at the Russians and Luis urged his Tiger to join the rolling crest. He wondered what the Reds could do to stop them. He unwrapped a packet of crackers and chewed, almost too excited to swallow; he had to guzzle from his canteen to get the crackers down.