Sniper's Honor(73)

His boot was so close. She remembered the SS boots at Kursk, as she had seen so many. Involuntarily the memories, which she had pressed so hard to forget, came over her as if in a sudden tide from her subconscious, where she had tried to lock them away.

It was called the Special Purpose Detachment, an ad hoc emergency assemblage of sharpshooters from all over the southern front, not just vets of Stalingrad but of Rostov, Sebastopol, Kharkov, Kiev, wherever the sniper had practiced his trade. Though most, like Mili, were army, this was strictly an NKVD operation. It was something only NKVD would think up.

“Tomorrow,” said the commissar, “July twelfth, two great tank armies will clash. Look at the map, comrades, and see that it is ordained. The Second SS Panzer Corps will send eight hundred Panzer IVs and Tiger Is and we will greet them with fifteen hundred T-34s from the Fifth Guards Tank Army. It will be the greatest tank battle in history, and you are privileged to fight in it.”

They were in a village called Prokhorovka, in the southern aspect of a salient that the German armored forces were trying to pinch off, then destroy, from two directions. Though a terrible melee on the ground, the battle was simple: the Germans would meet up, cutting off and surrounding the salient and turning it into an encirclement, then destroy the trapped hundreds of thousands; or they would not. It was up to the tankers of the 5th Guards to prevent that.

“At 0400 you will be distributed among the tanks as they rally and begin to move to the fields outside the village. There will be five of you per tank. You will ride them into battle, as our tank riders have done so heroically throughout the war. At a certain moment after daybreak, you will engage the German panzers. Those of you who survive the transit through the German artillery barrage will wait until the two tank armies are fully involved and then peel off and find some sort of shooting position, behind a ruined vehicle, in a copse of trees, in a scruff of vegetation, at the lip of a shell crater.

“You will see before you a field of ruin as the tanks begin to destroy each other on a massive scale. You have a specific job. You will note that when a German tank is hit and brought to a stop, it may or may not burn. That depends on the hit and a thousand other factors. If it does not burn, its crew will scamper out the hatch and head on foot back to German lines to acquire another tank and continue the fight. Your job, snipers, is to kill these men before they make it back. Shoot them down without mercy! Punish them for their cruelties, their atrocities, the evil of their invasion of the motherland, their destruction of our villages and towns. That is your holy mission.

“I have a warning as well. As I said, the German tanks will burn or not burn, depending on the placement of the shell. If the tanks burn, oftentimes their crew or some of their crew will make it out. These men will be aflame. Perhaps you have seen as much in your experience, and you know that watching a man burn to death is no easy thing.

“But your heart must be steel. You would not be human if you didn’t feel the impulse to put a mercy shot into that screaming, dancing apparition and end his agony. You are not permitted, under pain of execution, to shoot the flamers. You must concentrate on unwounded Germans. You are not permitted to waste time and ammunition on our own flamers. Order 270 will apply tomorrow on the killing ground. Remember: waste not one bullet on mercy.”

Order 270 was Stalin’s decree that the families of deserters or shirkers would be arrested as a consequence of their criminality. Mili snorted privately; her family was dead.

Within hours, she found herself clinging by a handhold to the hull of a T-34 (the commander was twenty and blond, reminding her a little of her dead brother Gregori) as it roared, amid a legion of its brethren, out of the village, deployed into a large wedge formation in the dawn light as far as the eye could see, and began its passage through the fields and the German artillery toward combat with another tank formation. The tanks scuttled and adjusted as they squirmed into the formation, cranking this way and that to find the right line and distance with regard to the others until all, more or less, had formed up. Like some kind of dinosaur army, they lurched forward, grinding across hill, dale, creek, tree, gully without regard, spewing smoke and grit, their long cannon barrels slightly upraised. They looked like beetles with a knight’s lance tucked into their mandibles.

They were on a plain under a dome of sky. All was flatness. It was an infinity of flatness under the towering clouds of the Ukrainian sky. It was a battle reduced to its essential elements with no distractions, almost an abstraction: the existential flatness of the plain to the horizon, the vaulting blue arch of cloud-filled sky, the sense of tininess of men and machines on this construction that only a mad god could have invented. The tanks lurched ahead.