Nikolai’s tank was hit twice. The first shell tore off all the tracks on one side and peeled open the hull. Down in the driver’s seat he felt the tank shudder and halt. The second shell took the turret a glancing blow and careened off into the hillside. But the impact was enough to kill the crew.
There were five men in the KV1 and four of them were dead. Nikolai, battered, bruised, and shaken, crawled out of his living tomb to the smell of running diesel fuel on hot metal. Bodies got in his way; he pushed them to one side.
The gun commander and gunner were sprawled over the breech, blood and mucus running from mouth, nose, and ears. Through the gap in the hull Nikolai could see the Tigers racing past, through the smoke of the other blazing KV1s.
To his surprise, he found the gun turret still worked. He hauled a shell up from the rack, pushed it into the breech, and closed the mechanism. He had never done it before, but he had seen it done. Usually it took two men. Feeling sick from the blow to his head down below and the stench of fuel up above, he turned the turret around, put his eye to the periscopic sight, found a Tiger barely three hundred yards away, and fired.
It turned out the one he had picked was the last of the five. The four Tigers up ahead did not notice. He reloaded, found another target, and fired again. The second Tiger took his shell in the gap between turret and hull, and exploded. Somewhere beneath Nikolai’s feet there was a low whump and flames began to trickle across the grass, spreading as they found more pools of fuel. After his second shell the remaining three Tigers noticed they were under attack from behind and turned. He took his third one side-on as it pulled around. The other two completed their turn and came back at him. That was when he knew he was dead.
He threw himself down and fell out of the rent in the KV’s side just before the Tigers’ answering shell took away the turret in which he had been standing. The ammunition began to explode; he could feel his blouse smolde
ring. So he rolled in the long grass, over and over, away from the wreck.
Then something happened that he did not expect and did not see. Ten SU-152s came over the ridge and the Tigers decided they had had enough. There were two left of five. They raced for the opposite slope and the crest above it. One got there and disappeared.
Nikolai felt someone hauling him to his feet. The man was a full colonel. The shallow valley was studded with wrecked tanks, six Russian and four German. His own tank was surrounded by three of the dead Tigers.
“Did you do this?” asked the colonel.
Nikolai could hardly hear him. His ears were ringing; he felt sick. He nodded.
“Come with me,” said the colonel. There was a small GAZ truck behind the ridge. The colonel drove for eight miles. They came to a bivouac. In front of the main tent was a long table covered in maps, being studied by a dozen high-ranking officers. The colonel halted the truck, strode forward, and threw up a salute. The senior general looked up.
Nikolai sat in the front passenger seat of the truck. He could see the colonel talking and the officers looking at him. Then the senior among them raised his hand and beckoned. Fearful that he had let two Tigers escape, Nikolai came down from the truck and marched over. His cotton blouse was scorched, his face blackened, and he stank of petrol and cordite.
“Three Tigers?” said General Pavel Rotmistrov, Commanding Officer, First Guards Tank Army. “From the rear? From a wrecked KV1?”
Nikolai stood there like an idiot and said nothing.
The general smiled and turned to a short, chunky man with piggy eyes and the insignia of a political commissar.
“I think that’s worth a bit of metal?”
The chunky commissar nodded. Comrade Stalin would approve. A box was brought from the tent. Rotmistrov pinned the order of Hero of the Soviet Union on the seventeen-year-old. The commissar, who happened to be Nikita Khrushchev, watched and nodded again.
Nikolai Nikolayev was told to report to a field hospital, where his scorched hands and face were treated with a smelly salve, and then return to the general’s headquarters. There he was given a field commission, a lieutenancy, and a platoon of three KV1s. Then it was back into combat.
That winter, with the Kursk salient miles behind him and the Panzers on the retreat, he received a captaincy and a company of brand-new heavy tanks fresh from the factory. They were the IS-2s, named after Josef Stalin. With a 122mm gun and thicker armor, they became known as the Tiger Killers.
At Operation Bagration he got his second Hero of the Soviet Union medal for outstanding personal bravery and on the outskirts of Berlin, fighting under Marshal Chuikov, the third.
This was the man, almost fifty-five years later, that Jason Monk had come to see.
If the old general had been a bit more tactful with the Politburo he would have got his marshal’s baton and with it a big retirement dacha out along the Moskva River at Peredelkino with the rest of the fat cats, all free as a gift of the state. But he always told them what he really thought, and they did not always like it.
So he built his own more modest bungalow for his declining years, off the Minsk road on the way to Tukhovo, an area studded with army camps where he could at least be close to what remained of his beloved army.
He had never married—“no life for a young girl” he would say of his numerous postings to the bleakest outposts of the Soviet empire—and at seventy-three he lived with a faithful valet, a former master sergeant with one foot, and an Irish wolfhound with four feet.
Monk had tracked down his rather humble abode simply by asking the villagers in the nearby communities where Uncle Kolya lived. Years earlier, when he had entered middle age, the old general had been given the nickname by his younger officers, and it stuck. His hair and moustache had turned prematurely white so that he looked old enough to be the uncle of all of them. General of the Army Nikolayev was good enough for the newspapers, but every ex-soldier in the country knew him as Dyadya Kolya.
As Monk was driving a Defense Ministry staff car that evening and was dressed as a full colonel of the General Staff, the villagers saw no reason not to point out that Uncle Kolya lived at such-and-such a place.
It was pitch-black and freezing cold when Monk knocked at the door a little after nine in the evening. The limping valet answered, and seeing the uniform let him in.
General Nikolayev was expecting no visitors, but the staff colonel’s uniform and the attaché case caused him no more than mild surprise. He was in his favorite armchair by a roaring log fire reading a military memoir by a younger general and occasionally snorting in derision. He knew them all, he knew what they had done and, more embarrassing, he knew what they had never done, no matter what they claimed now that they could make money by writing fictitious history.
He looked up when Valodya announced he had a visitor from Moscow and left.