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  Heidemann tossed Langer a sack of army bread only four days old and two large cheeses that had seen better days. "Sorry, this is all there is. Supplies will take a while to straighten out. After all, they have to have the proper requisition forms, you know. Hunger is not reason enough for the machinery of the German army to grant one something to eat.”

  Langer yelled something unintelligible down to Gus, who stuck his head up through the driver's hatch mumbling. He climbed out and then leaned back in grunting, his pants showing a large plaid patch on the ass. He hauled up a couple of sacks and tossed them down to the feet of Heidemann. Jumping down to stand in front of him he clicked his heels, brought his arm up in the Hitler-style salute, bellowing at the top of his lungs. "Sir, Obergefreiter Gustav Beidemann begs to report that he has, using the initiative ordained in the book of Holy German Army regulations, section 23-2 sub paragraph 765-b, prevented certain items from falling into the hands of the godless subhuman Bolsheviks, which I present to Herr Hauptmann as regulations require for his disposal of, sir!" With a moué of distaste, Heidemann returned the salute in the army manner and kicked the sacks.

  "You know Gus," Carl said. "When Kharkov was burning we came across a supply truck loaded with all the necessities of life for the general officers' mess. It had a busted axle so Gus shoved it out of the way with the Tiger, and in exchange for giving the driver a ride out of the town, we loaded up with enough general type food and booze to last for a couple of weeks."

  Heidemann gave Gus a dirty look. "What happened to the truck? You know the penalty that will come down when the brass finds their chow is gone!"

  Gus smirked. "No problem, Herr Hauptmann. Teacher put a round from the eighty-eight into the truck and it became just one more casualty of the greater war against Bolshevism."

  In spite of himself, Captain Heidemann couldn't repress a grin. "All right, Langer, you take your animals and get to a place you can cover the bridge from." Picking up the sacks he looked at Gus still standing at rigid attention. "Beidemann, you are without a doubt the most obnoxious, ill-disciplined and insubordinate bastard I have ever met in my life." His bags clanked as he slung them over his shoulder.

  "Thanks."

  Before September ended the crossings at Cherkassy, Kremenchug, Dnepropetrovsk and Kanev had been in use day and night. Manstein's forces poured through these fragile channels and deployed to right and left, taking up positions on what was now to be called "The Eastern Rampart."

  The Russians ignored German propaganda claims that they would be destroyed at the banks of the Dnieper and continued to overrun German rear-guard units at will until the twenty-first advance, elements of Vatutin's 3rd Guards Army reached the banks of the river and, three days later had already established several small bridgeheads on the opposite banks where the German forces were spread too thin to effectively oppose them. During this phase the Germans had only one minor success. Vatutin ordered the 1st, 3rd and 5th Guards Parachute Brigades to be dropped on the German side of the Dnieper to reinforce the Soviet bridgeheads and to also block the advances of any German reinforcements. Their timing was a little off. The 1st and 3rd missed their DZ and the 10th Panzer Grenadier Division having moved in the night before was directly under them when the 5th Guards made their jump. The 5th Guards were promptly torn to pieces by the Grenadiers, many of them while still hanging in the sky from their parachutes. Less than two thousand of the nearly eight thousand men dropped survived the next few days to join up with partisan forces in the area. The rest were hunted down and killed or captured.

  Langer returned from Heidemann's HQ with the word they were to load up and move out. They were to head north a few kilometers and lend support to a battalion of Jagers that faced a section of the river where it narrowed.

  "All right, Teacher, get the others together and take this thing," referring to the Tiger, "over to the depot and load up with everything you can get your hands on. If there's any problem, let Gus do the negotiating. I'll meet you there a little later. I've got to figure out our route on this.” He took a Russian road map out of his jacket. “I don't know how the Russians ever find us if they're using their own charts."

  CHAPTER TEN

  Teacher watched the broad back of his tank commander as he heaved one 88 mm shell after another up to Gus. Gus handed them to Yuri, who stuck them into the holding racks. Langer was as strong as anyone he had ever seen for his size. He never seemed to suffer from the almost chronic conditions of diarrhea which hounded most armies in the field. Bad water, bad food, bad schnapps, nothing seemed to upset him for long. What was there about him that picked at the edges of his mind? Why did Langer live when others died? There was the time when they had been overrun by Siberians and Carl had been hit in the gut. Teacher had seen enough wounds to know that the one Langer received should have been fatal. From the entry point of the bullet it should have torn his liver in two. They had left him for dead – no pulse, no sign of breath, no eye reflex. Langer was dead. But two days later he showed up again apparently none the worse for his wound, only complaining a little about minor stomach pains.

  Langer's explanation was that the bullet had entered and exited cleanly, leaving only a puncture. Always sounded somewhat implausible to him, but they had been too busy staying in front of Ivan to worry much. They were glad enough to have him back no matter what the reason. Not until later did Teacher try to analyze it, and it never made sense. The wound Langer had was a killing one, at best even if it had entered and left cleanly, it would still have torn him up inside from the shock wave effect that a high-velocity bullet always has on human tissue.

  Teacher considered himself to be well educated and versed in history, which he taught in the Gymnasium in Cologne. But Langer would come out every now and then with a fragment of information that only scholars of ancient history would have been familiar with. His ability to speak languages, even that of Yuri. He also knew the man's customs. Sometimes he spoke of the past as if it had just happened. Like the first winter of the retreat from Moscow. Teacher had told him he thought it must be as cold as when Napoleon had to retreat.

  Langer had, offhandedly, said simply, "No, it was colder then."

  A statement of fact, no more, no less, said with the conviction of one who knows for sure what he is talking about.

  * * *

  Gus shifted into neutral as Carl called down, "What the hell's going on? Where do you think you're going?"

  "TANKS!" a youngster yelled back, panic at the edge of his voice. "The Russians are crossing the river! They've built a bridge just under the surface, and they're coming across, hundreds of them, Siberians!"

  Langer forced the young corporal to climb on the tank with him, along with three other men, and guided them to the crossing. Manny tried to raise HQ on the radio, but all he got was static.

  Teacher checked his 88, and Yuri took his position. He was ready to hand up, from the ammo racks, whichever shell might be needed, as they rumbled on toward the Russian penetration.

  A short burst from the hull gun convinced the increasing numbers of fleeing soldiers that it would be wiser to return to their positions and face the oncoming Siberians than to be ground under the treads of their own tanks. From the expression on the tank commander's face, they had no doubt that that was exactly what he would do if they didn't obey his orders.

  The massive steel leviathan escorting them helped to return some of their courage; they were soldiers again, not a fleeing mass of panic-stricken men.

  A shadow loomed in the dark, and the Tiger's instant response blew the T-34 into a burning hulk, before Ivan had even spotted them.

  The sight of the burning tank gave the German infantry new heart, and they moved forward under the protection of the Tiger's 88. Others from the dark woods began to join them, forming into groups, weapons at the ready. They were hunched figures flickering in the flames of the burning Russian tank.

  Another T-34 came at them from the side, crashing out of the tree line, firing. Its 76
mm round hit the Tiger's turret at an angle; and even though they were no more than fifty meters apart, the shell ricocheted off to explode in the distance. Trees prevented the Tiger's crew from maneuvering or turning its gun to face the attacker.

  The young corporal, who had been so terrified just moments before, leaped off the Tiger and ran to meet the advancing Russian. Halting by the body of one of the Pioneers that had been with him, he took the man's demolitions bag and opened it while running and twisting through the trees. When he tossed the bag away he held in his hands a geballte Ladung: a bundled charge of six grenade heads taped around the head of a complete stick grenade. Throwing himself to the earth in front of the T-34, he let the monster move over him as he had been taught at the training school at Kaiserslautern, and the steel bottom scraped his helmet as it passed. Immediately the youngster rose, pulled the igniter on the bundle charge, tossed it on the tanks rear deck, and threw himself to the side seeking shelter in the roots of trees.

  The geballte blew with enough force to wreck the engine compartment, leaving the T-34 unable to move, but still dangerous. Its guns continued to fire and sweep over the Germans on the trail. The Russian crew fired and loaded faster than they had ever done in their lives.

  A Stabsgefreiter from the Pioneers took advantage of the tank's blind spots and set a magnetic mine at the junction of hull and turret. Then he threw himself down beside the corporal, burying his face in the earth.

  The Soviet monster died in less than a beat of a heart when the mine blew the turret open and exploded the ammo inside. The Germans had no time to congratulate themselves before their backs were ripped open by bursts from PPs 41s. The Russian infantry support was catching up, but without the aid of their comrades in the dead tank, the Germans made short work of them. With the aid of the Tiger's hull machine guns, Gus had finally worked the Tiger around where it could trace the enemy's route back.

  The Russians hadn't fully exploited the river crossing. One of their tanks had stalled on the underwater bridge, and the others were lined up behind it, trying to push it off of the side when Langer's Tiger came on the scene. The Ivans were being aided in their effort to clear the bridge by Langer, when a round from his 88 blew the stalled tank clear from the bridge. Cursing as he realized his mistake in blasting the sitting duck free so that the others could come on, he fired again at the leading tank, aiming for the treads.

  "FIRE!"

  The round blew the Russian half on and half off the bridge. The crossing was barred again.

  One T-34 after another was knocked out. After they hit the leading tank, he took out the rear. That left eight more stuck in the center, unable to advance or withdraw. One by one they fell prey to the pinpoint fire of the lone Tiger opposing them. The German infantry was mopping up the few Siberians that had managed to get across. No prisoners were taken, they didn't have the time or the men to spare for such niceties. That, along with what their fellows suffered at the hands of the wild Asians, made their choice easy...

  The opposite bank of the river burst into flashes of fire and smoke. Shells by the hundreds began to fall among the milling mass of Russian tanks that had been awaiting their turn to line up for the crossing. These monsters had been unable to lend any support to their comrades on the bridge. When Russian intelligence selected this site they did so because of the narrow defile leading to the crossing. It would aid in keeping their vehicles from being spotted from the air or opposite bank. This choice now made the defile a mass grave for hundreds of men as the combined artillery of three German batteries poured onto them. Someone had got through to HQ with the coordinates of the Russian attack, and was now calling down accurate fire on the congested Russian column. This attempt had been stopped, but there would be others.

  Three days later, Field Marshal Eric von Manstein conferred the Knight's Cross on Stabsfeldwebel Langer, commander of the tank crew, and the Iron Cross first class on the rest of the crew.

  Hanging the ribbon with its dangling cross around the sergeant's neck, the aristocratic field marshal gave the awardee a long strange look, as if there was something in the man's face that he was supposed to see, but somehow had missed.

  The small formation had not been dismissed ten minutes before Gus was trying to sell his medal to a newly arrived member of a supporting Pioneer battalion which had been assigned to their area. Manfried was ecstatic with the thought of how proud his father would be. Teacher merely gave his to Yuri. The Tatar had been omitted at the ceremony, and Teacher didn't really give a rat's ass for any piece of tin; all he wanted from the war was out.

  Autumn soon came with its changing colors and hints of the snow that lay not far behind. The fields and trees were glorious in the kaleidoscope of colors that preceded the advent of the Russian winter.

  The Russians continued their attempts to break through the forces on the Dnieper time and again. It seemed that they had a never-ending supply of men and material to throw against the defenders, who had less to resist them with every day. The snows came and gave the landscape a deceptive look of peace and tranquility. The snow, a clean white sheet, covered the horrors of thousands of decaying bodies of men and horses; and it turned the burned-out shells of tanks into small white hills that dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see...

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  From that time on, until the first blast of November, they served as a fire brigade in one savage confrontation after another. Twice their Tiger had to be taken in for repairs that they couldn't handle in the fields; once for a complete engine overhaul, and another time to have the transversing rings and rollers replaced. Other than that they had been lucky. But another winter was coming now; and flurries of snow in the morning and evening were harbingers of the white death that would soon sweep down on them. True, they were fairly well outfitted with winter gear and felt boots like those of the Russians, but their equipment wasn't designed with the tolerances of their Soviet counterparts. Their guns would still freeze up, the oil in the breeches would lock solid, trucks and cars that stopped in bad weather would have their blocks frozen solid, and men would die of carbon monoxide poisoning from trying to sleep in their vehicles while keeping the motors running.

  The battalion was reformed. The faces of the replacements were younger every year, indeed every month. Faces like Manny's that would soon look older than their years, especially their eyes, old men's eyes in eighteen-year-old faces.

  Nikopol was to their front about three or four kilometers, and just to the rear was the encampment of the Kalmyks. They, along with Heidemann's unit, had been assigned to the defense of Nikopol. The Kalmyks, along with their families, had fought fiercely alongside the Germans ever since 1942. They hated the Russians with a savagery that even the SS couldn't match.

  They had left the Kalmyk steppes, with their wives and families driving their herds of horses before them. Now they served as scouts, and they specialized in rooting out partisans. They had stayed with the 16th Panzers all the way, and thought of the division as their own personal property and family, something to defend at all costs. They, and Heidemann, were under the command of General of Mountain Troops, Ferdinand Schorner.

  The German forces held a bridgehead in an arc seventy-five kilometers across. Behind them ran the Dnieper, and on their southern flank was the Plavna, a swamp covering a larger area than their own perimeter; these swampy lowlands were the haunts of the partisans. Without the aid of the half-savage Kalmyk cavalry units, it would have been almost impossible to control the guerrillas in the morass of reeds and marsh.

  Here they waited, fighting and dying until Father Winter finally proclaimed his mastery over the land. The great cold had come, and like the animals, those that could bury themselves in the earth did so to seek whatever shelter and warmth they could. Anything to keep out of the icy wind that froze a man's feet into blackened stumps, and sapped the will to live until one just sat down and quit, waiting for the peace that would come with freezing. Freezing wasn't so bad; the old-timer
s said that after a while you couldn't feel the cold, and then for a short time you were actually warm, and that was when death would come...

  Langer sat, his eyes barely showing over the lip of the open turret hatch, trying to pierce the darkness. They were out there; every instinct told him that they were coming. It had been too quiet for the last few days, only scouting patrols had been intercepted. It was too quiet! Now he took the watch just before the hours of dawn, Ivan's favorite time to attack. That was when the body in sleep or repose took the longest time to get awake, when seconds meant the difference between life and death. His eyes blanked out. "Flares!"

  The sounds reached him split seconds later, but he was already inside the hatch. The Russian barrage lit up the night, one long continuous rolling wave of fiery destruction. It rumbled across the frozen earth. It rolled over them, missing the sitting Tiger. Only the spaaang of ricocheting shrapnel told them how close they had come to being destroyed.

  The radio crackled, Heidemann's voice breaking in. "All Panzers, start engines and move out, give support to the infantry, but don't tie yourselves down. If you have to leave them, we can't afford to lose any more armor. This is the Breakout: follow plan “C' to rendezvous; you're on your own, Ivan is hitting us too." The crackling of the radio stopped, there was no need for anything more to be said.

  General Schorner had been expecting this, and contrary to Hitler's orders of "Fight to the last man," he preferred to risk his own life and disobey the suicide orders to save his men. Strangely enough, the order for Breakout was, "Ladies, excuse me, please."

  From the north, General Chuykov's 8th Guards Army assaulted the rear of the bridgehead. It was the night of 31 January.