In the Balance

The dustbin cupola at the back of the turret gave a decent view even when closed down. Like any tank commander worth his black coveralls, Jager left it open and stood up in it whenever he could. Not only could he see more than even through good periscopes, the air was fresher and cooler and the racket less-or at least different. He traded being surrounded by engine rumble for the iron clash and rattle of the spare wheels and tracks lashed to the tank’s rear deck.

He frowned a little. If the German logistics train were better run, he wouldn’t have had to carry his own spares to make sure they were there when he needed them. But the eastern front ran more than three thousand kilometers from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Expecting the high foreheads who were out of harm’s way to care what happened to any one tank commander was too much to hope for.

The panzers rolled through the detritus of battle, past graves hastily dug in the rich dark soil of the Ukraine; past stinking, bloated Russian corpses still unburied; past wrecked trucks and tanks of both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. German engineers swarmed over those like flies over the corpses, salvaging whatever they could.

The gently rolling country stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see. Not even war’s wounds scarred it too Severely. Sometimes when Jager looked out across that sea of green, his dozen tanks seemed all alone. He grinned when, off in the distance, he spied a German infantry company.

Once or twice, planes buzzed by overhead. That made him grin more widely. Somewhere east of Izyum, Ivan was going to catch hell.

A noise like the end of the world-the panzer a couple of hundred meters to his right went up in a fireball. One second it was there, the next nothing but red and yellow flame and a column of black, greasy smoke mounting to the sky. A moment later came the barks of secondary explosions as the tank’s ammunition began going off. The five-man crew couldn’t have known what hit them. Jager told himself that, anyhow, as he dove down inside the turret.

“What the fuck was that?” asked Georg Schultz. The gunner had heard the blast through thick steel and through the racket of his own tank’s motor.

“Joachim’s tank just went up,” Jager answered “Must have bit: a mine-but the Ivans aren’t supposed to have laid any mines around here.” His voice showed his doubt, the explosion had been very violent for a mine. Maybe if the blast went up into the gas tank, the captain thought. No sooner had the idea crossed his mind then another panzer went up with an even louder detonation than the first.

“Jesus!” Schultz shouted. He stared fearfully at the metal floor of the tank, as if wondering when a white-hot jet of flame would burst through it.

Jager grabbed for the radio that linked him with the rest of the company, hit the all-hands frequency. “All halt!” he bawled. “We’re hitting mines.” He shouted the order forward to Dieter Schmidt, then stood up in the cupola to make sure it was being obeyed.

The ten surviving tanks of the company did stop. The rest of the commanders bounced up just like Jager, each of them trying to see what was going on. But for two blazing hulks, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Jager was about to call divisional headquarters to ask for a sapper detachment when a lance of fire tore across the sky and blew the turret clean off one of the stopped panzers. The oily chassis promptly began to burn.

Cursing his own mistake, Jager let himself fall back into the turret. He grabbed the radio, screamed, “Get moving! They’re rockets from the air, not mines! The Ivans must have found some way to mount Kasyushas on their ground-attack planes. If we stay where we are, we’re sitting ducks.” He didn’t need to relay the order to Schmidt this time; his Panzer III was already lurching ahead, the engine roaring flat out.

Only as the captain went up into the cupola again did he consciously realize the trail of fire in the sky had come from the west, from behind him. “Turn the turret around!” he yelled, and cursed the hydraulics as the heavy dome of metal ever so slowly began to traverse. A couple of the other commanders had been more alert. Their tanks’ turrets were already slewing to the rear.

Jager turned that way himself. As he did so, a fourth panzer was hit in the engine compartment. Flames began to spurt. Turret doors flew open; men started bailing out. One, two, three… commander, gunner, loader. Fire washed over the whole tank. The driver and hull gunner never had a chance.

The company commander frantically scanned the sky. Where was the Stormovik, the armored Russian attack plane that was likeliest to be carrying Katyusha rockets? His heart leapt when he spotted a flying shape. The coaxial 7.92mm machine guns of the company’s faster-reacting panzers spat flame at it. They weren’t likely to hurt it, but might keep the pilot from making a low firing run.