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They raised their guns and aimed at the prisoners.
"No," Erik said. "No, you can't." Nobody heard him.
A woman prisoner screamed. Erik saw her grab the eleven-year-old boy and clasp him to herself, as if her arms around him could stop bullets. She seemed to be his mother.
An officer said: "Fire."
The rifles cracked. The prisoners staggered and fell. The noise dislodged a little snow from the pines, and it fell on the riflemen, a sprinkling of pure white.
Erik saw the boy and his mother drop, still locked together in an embrace. "No," he said. "Oh, no!"
The sergeant looked at him. "What's the matter with you?" he said irritably. "Who are you, anyway?"
"Medical orderly," said Erik, without taking his eyes off the dread scene in the pit.
"What are you doing here?"
"I brought an ambulance for the officers hurt in the collision." Erik saw that another twelve prisoners were already being marched down th
e slope into the quarry. "Oh, God, my father was right," he moaned. "We're murdering people."
"Stop whining and fuck off back to your ambulance."
"Yes, Sergeant," said Erik.
iii
At the end of November Volodya asked for a transfer to a fighting unit. His intelligence work no longer seemed important: the Red Army did not need spies in Berlin to discover the intentions of a German army that was already on the outskirts of Moscow. And he wanted to fight for his city.
His misgivings about the government came to seem trivial. Stalin's stupidity, the brutishness of the secret police, the way nothing in the Soviet Union worked the way it was supposed to work--all that faded away. He felt nothing but a blazing need to repel the invader who threatened to bring violence, rape, starvation, and death to his mother, his sister, the twins Dimka and Tania, and Zoya.
He was sharply aware that if everyone thought that way he would have no spies. His German informants were people who had decided that patriotism and loyalty were outweighed by the terrible wickedness of the Nazis. He was grateful to them for their courage and the stern morality that drove them. But he felt differently.
So did many of the younger men in Red Army Intelligence, and a small company of them joined a rifle battalion at the beginning of December. Volodya kissed his parents, wrote a note to Zoya saying he hoped to survive to see her again, and moved into barracks.
At long last, Stalin brought reinforcements from the east to Moscow. Thirteen Siberian divisions were deployed against the ever-nearer Germans. On their way to the front line some of them stopped briefly in Moscow, and Muscovites on the streets stared at them in their white padded coats and warm sheepskin boots, with their skis and goggles and hardy steppe ponies. They arrived in time for the Russian counterattack.
This was the Red Army's last chance. Time and time again, in the last five months, the Soviet Union had hurled hundreds of thousands of men at the invaders. Each time the Germans had paused, dealt with the attack, and continued their relentless advance. But if this attempt failed there would be no more. The Germans would have Moscow, and when they had Moscow they would have the USSR. And then his mother would be trading vodka for black-market milk for Dimka and Tania.
On the fourth day of December the Soviet forces moved out of the city to the north, west, and south and took up their positions for the last effort. They went without lights, to avoid alerting the enemy. They were not allowed to have fires or smoke tobacco.
That evening the front line was visited by NKVD agents. Volodya did not see his rodent-faced brother-in-law, Ilya Dvorkin, who must have been among them. A pair he did not recognize came to the bivouac where Volodya and a dozen men were cleaning their rifles. Have you heard anyone criticizing the government? they asked. What do the fellows say about Comrade Stalin? Who among your comrades questions the wisdom of the army's strategy and tactics?
Volodya was incredulous. What did it matter at this point? In the next few days Moscow would be saved or lost. Who cared if soldiers bitched about their officers? He cut the questioning short, saying that he and his men were under a rule of silence, and he had orders to shoot anyone who broke it, but--he added recklessly--he would let the secret policemen off if they left immediately.
That worked, but Volodya had no doubt that the NKVD was undermining the morale of the troops all along the line.
On Friday, December 5, in the evening, the Russian artillery thundered into action. Next morning at dawn Volodya and his battalion moved off in a blizzard. Their orders were to take a small town on the far side of a canal.
Volodya ignored orders to attack the German defenses frontally--that was the old-fashioned Russian tactic, and this was no moment to stick obstinately to wrongheaded ideas. With his company of a hundred men he went upstream and crossed the ice to the north of the town, then moved in on the Germans' flank. He could hear the crash and roar of battle off to his left, so he knew he was behind the enemy's front line.
Volodya was almost blinded by the blizzard. The occasional blaze of gunfire lit up the clouds for a moment, but at ground level visibility was only a few yards. However, he thought optimistically, that would help the Russians creep up on the Germans and take them by surprise.
It was viciously cold, down to minus thirty-five degrees centigrade in places, and while this was bad for both sides, it was worse for the Germans, who lacked cold-weather supplies.
Somewhat to his surprise Volodya found that the normally efficient Germans had not consolidated their line. There were no trenches, no antitank ditches, no dugouts. Their front was no more than a series of strongpoints. It was easy to slip through the gaps into the town and look for soft targets, barracks and canteens and ammunition dumps.
His men shot three sentries to take a soccer field in which were parked fifty tanks. Could it be so easy? Volodya wondered. Was the force that had conquered half Russia now depleted and spent?
