Chad Thumann - The Undesirables

Meanwhile that fire blazed. And for the first night in weeks, she felt truly warm.

The next morning, Karen went out to the courtyard. The snow mound had been dug up. Her father’s body was gone. She knew she couldn’t wait any longer. Even if she could find another shovel to start a garden, it would be pointless, because she wouldn’t survive until summer.

She no longer needed a shovel. She needed information. She needed to know where the Germans were, the location of the nearest unoccupied town, and how to reach it. She needed food so that she could travel. She needed identification papers that would allow her to pass Red Army checkpoints. And most of all, she needed a weapon and the courage to use it.

Karen didn’t know how she would get any of those things. Even finding a simple shovel had been difficult. But she promised herself to find a way, because without them she would never escape Leningrad.

A sort of madness had come over Petr. His heartbeat had slowed. It seemed to him that the woods had grown quieter. They had grown much louder, in fact, as the German panzer tanks neared and their guns fired more often. It only seemed quieter because Petr’s mind was focusing on the stalled truck, on the missile rack in its bed, on the Katyusha launcher, and the hump-backed stone bridge that rose like a steep hill almost directly before the truck. The sound of the guns and the tank treads meant nothing in Petr’s mind, pushed back to his subconscious.

Petr began to manhandle the launch rack, lowering it farther than he’d ever done so that the rocket tips practically rested on the top of the truck’s cab. Then he crawled up underneath the rockets to peer through the cab’s rear window, over the driver’s seat and steering wheel, and through the windshield.

The German tanks were coming into view. These were the twenty-five-ton Panzer IVs, pride of the Wehrmacht—the German Army. Their wide, boxy frames were slung low to the ground, and they squeezed between the bare birch trees, knocking down trunks where the passage was too narrow. A short howitzer protruded from each tank’s turret like the chunky nose of a prizefighter. Their three-inch-wide shells could reduce concrete fortifications to rubble, Petr knew, and the machine guns extending from their lower hulls added deadly firepower. Petr had to admit that a panzer had a terrifying beauty, like a Siberian tiger.

Here he was, finally seeing his first Germans. The infantry ran beside the tanks, keeping pace, and carrying rifles, machine guns, and boxes of ammunition. The German soldiers’ uniforms seemed designed to intimidate. Their steel helmets angled slightly backward, framing each man’s head in a way that suggested the sharp beak of an eagle. Long, gray coats were draped over each soldier’s smart gray-green uniform and knee-high black leather boots. They looked like stern school headmasters, industrial foremen, or even politicians. They gave Petr the uneasy feeling that they were men born to command—to expect and demand obedience from all they faced.

Petr noted with satisfaction, however, that the Russian winter had already begun to degrade the psychological impact of that carefully designed German uniform. The soldiers’ heavy gray coats tangled their legs, slowed their pace, and sopped up the wet snow. Their boots looked soaked through and caked with ice. Their eaglelike faces were pale with cold, and the misty breaths that puffed from their mouths showed their mounting fatigue.

The lead panzer rumbled up to the other side of the bridge, its black exhaust climbing behind it into the still air. Then it paused, Petr heard ice cracking, and a hatch swung open on top of the tank’s turret.

A soldier pulled himself up and half-out of the hatch. He wore a black leather jacket and a peaked cap, and he looked both warm and calm. He lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and began to scan the area across the river.

Petr knew the man wouldn’t see much to give him concern. The Red Army had already fled, leaving nothing behind but empty rocket cases and abandoned rifles or machine guns. The truck in which Petr hid was the only vehicle left. And a single shot from the tank’s three-inch howitzer would make short work of that.

The tank commander’s binoculars halted on Petr’s stalled truck, trained directly at the windshield, directly at Petr. Petr froze. He was staring right at the tank commander, and the commander was staring right back. But he couldn’t see Petr. The sun was bright in the white sky, brighter still as it glistened off the blinding snow blanketing the river’s ice; and the area in which Petr was hiding, under the missile launch rack, was shadowed by the Katyusha rockets.

The truck’s bright exterior and dark interior turned the windshield into a one-way mirror. The tank commander surely couldn’t see through it, couldn’t see anything but his own reflection looking back at him. And yet the commander held his gaze, as if reassuring himself there was nothing on that side of the river to fear, that the Katyusha truck really was abandoned, really was the fat prize it seemed to be.

Petr held his breath. And then, finally, the tank commander lowered his binoculars and yelled something in German. A young soldier, probably an infantry sergeant, trudged up to the tank commander. The tank commander yelled again, sweeping the riverbank with a pointing finger. The infantry sergeant turned to bark at the troops, relaying the tank commander’s orders.

Three machine gunners and their assistants hustled up to the riverbank and plopped down into the snow. The machine gunners slung their weapons off their shoulders and propped the barrels onto folding bipods while their assistants cracked open metal boxes and slapped belts of ammunition into the guns’ chambers. When they were ready, the infantry sergeant barked again.

The bullets tore into the snow, gravel, and mud on Petr’s side of the river. But they didn’t hit the stalled truck. The machine gunners carefully traced their fire around the vehicle—clearly, the orders were not to damage the prized Katyushas.

Once the ammunition belts were spent, riflemen ran forward with more ammo boxes, and the assistants loaded new bullets into the guns. But this time the machine gunners didn’t fire. They just stared across the river, fingers likely resting gently on their triggers.

The tank commander yelled something and banged on the turret. A gearbox ground as the unseen driver shifted the panzer into low gear. And the heavy tank disappeared from Petr’s view, hidden by the tall, humped bridge as it inched onto the stone and began to climb across.

Petr couldn’t see the panzer, but he made out its black exhaust puffing into the sky. Soon the tank would be on his side of the river. Then the infantry would follow, and they’d capture the Katyusha launcher, and they’d capture or kill Petr.

The tank commander’s head appeared over the crest of the bridge, then his chest and arms. He looked back and forth, squinting at the bright light reflecting off the snow, wary of any potential ambush. Then Petr saw the turret and the snub-nosed howitzer, then the hull and machine gun, so close that he could see the whites of the driver’s eyes behind the view slit.

Petr saw the tracks, and finally the bottom of the tank—the under hull. It rose up over the hump of the bridge. This was the tank’s weakest point—the unarmored underbelly between its tracks. An instant later the tank would clear the hump and descend to the other side, showing only its steel-plated armored front of more than two inches, impervious to all but the biggest Russian guns.

Nobody fired at a tank from nearly beneath it. But Petr could. In a single motion he squeezed the trigger and dove from the truck. Before he hit the ground, he felt a searing pain in his legs as the rocket exhaust burned through his telogreika trousers.

He was only dimly aware of explosions. The snow enveloped him. For a moment he could think of nothing but the excruciating pain in his legs. He heard a supersonic zip—bullets passing right over his head. The machine gunners had seen him jump from the truck and were zeroing in. He rolled to his right. This drenched his smoking legs in more wet snow, a moment’s relief from the pain, but more important, it sent him directly under the truck, its three axles shielding him from the German machine guns for now.

Their slugs ripped into Soviet steel, into the truck’s bed, cab, and tires, deafening Petr with their impact and rocking the truck back and forth above him. He pulled himself forward on his elbows and peered out between the truck’s front wheels.

Petr had hit that panzer with over a dozen Katyusha rockets, each packed with eleven pounds of high explosives. At least two rockets must have struck the tank’s soft underbelly. The explosions multiplied as the panzer’s ammo ignited, leaving a charred and smoking twist of steel. The vehicle was no longer a tank, it was a roadblock. Until its wreckage could be cleared, no German panzers would be crossing the bridge.

Another tank tried to cross the river directly. It rumbled out onto the snow-covered ice, rolling fifteen feet across before the ice broke with a terrific crack. The tank plunged like a boulder into the shallow depth, the icy water surging through gun slits and view ports. Hatches popped open everywhere at once, and the five-man crew struggled to wade through the frigid current to the safety of the German-held shore. Petr suspected they would die of hypothermia.

The Panzer IV unit had three more tanks, and these began taking control of the chaos. Two had driven up to the bridge, where they slowly tried to push the destroyed hulk of their comrade panzer off the bridge and into the river.