Is it really written all over my face? It's really not a long way to get into trouble if the first person I meet sees right into my mind…
“My father told me about World War I,” I carefully answered my interlocutor, who turned out to be overly perspicacious, “He did not go to war himself, but he talked to those who had been there. I wouldn't want to be in those trenches. Not many people came back from there.”
“So he was telling you about the imperialist war,” grinned Boris, “Well, that's another thing. The people there died for the interests of the bourgeoisie, and we are going to defend our socialist homeland. You have to understand the difference.”
“I'm not arguing,” I decided not to escalate the discussion. I have attracted too much attention to my modest person, it's time to change the delicate subject, “Do you know when we're going to get weapons? I feel uncomfortable – the front is coming soon, and my hands are empty. I grew up in the taiga, you can't do without a gun there. Even now I feel like I'm naked.”
“In the taiga, you say? A hunter?” Boris was interested. I noticed that the other neighbors in the van were beginning to listen to our conversation.
“Of course I'm a hunter. In the taiga, all men are hunters.”
“And you must be a pretty good shot, with all that practice?” asked the guy on the next bunk with the unruly frizz of hair which he kept trying unsuccessfully to smooth out.
“My father was pleased,” I answered evasively, “but it's hard for me to judge, I have no one to compare it to. My skills were enough for a successful hunt.”
“I don't know about weapons,” Boris remembered my question, “they'll give them to us, don't worry. When we arrive, we'll be assigned to a combat unit, and then we'll get weapons.”
“Okay, if so…” I yawned in a pointed manner and leaned against the swaying wall of the wagon, “I'm going to sleep for a while, I'm sleepy.”
I closed my eyes and lightly tensed the right facial muscles, activating the interactive mode with the contact lenses. To begin with, where are we? Thus, the nearest major station is Khristinovka. This is 300 kilometers south of Kiev and 20 kilometers northwest of Uman. We'll be there in a couple of hours if we don't get stuck passing someone again, or if the Germans don't bomb the way.
The situation on this section of the front is changing quite rapidly. Kiev is still holding on thanks to the fortifications built before the war, but the Germans are advancing stubbornly on the flanks, encircling the city from the north and south.
That's where they're taking us, to the south flank, only why are we still going forward? It's not like we're a regular unit with guns, ammunition, and a clear mission. We still need to form some units, at least to train those who are completely out of the loop, they have to give us weapons, finally. Where are we going? And why so careless? German planes should already be flying in even here, and a train going to the front in the middle of the day is not a target that Luftwaffe pilots would consider of secondary importance. But this is understandable to me, with my level of awareness, which no one else here has, including the leadership of the Red Army and Wehrmacht, although the Germans are better at it – no matter how you look at it, air supremacy greatly improves the quality of air reconnaissance.
So, what else don't the higher-ups know about? Or they know, but have not yet had time to react properly and give the necessary orders. The communication here and now… Let's not talk about sad things.
No one but me on this train knows that less than a couple of hundred kilometers west of our train, the Germans have thrown a fresh infantry division into battle, and the defense of the city of Gaisin, which seemed more or less stable, has collapsed, burying under it the hope of holding the front. Major General Volokh's 18th Mechanized Corps, which had held the 12th Army's defenses together a few days earlier, was dismembered, suffered heavy losses and was rapidly losing combat effectiveness, retreating chaotically to the east.
But that wasn't even the worst part. In the path of the Wehrmacht division that took Gaisin, there are still enough Red Army troops that, although retreating, put up a fierce resistance, regularly launching counterattacks. Much worse, Major General Hubert Lantz's First Mountain Division, taking advantage of the success of its neighbors, formed a strike motorized group that made a 70-kilometer dash southeast in one day and found itself deep in the rear of the Soviet forces, and more and more German 49 Corps units began to be rapidly drawn into the resulting gap. The Soviet defense near Uman was disorganized, and no one in the leadership of the southwestern front really knows what is really going on there. And so into this meat grinder we go, remaining in serene ignorance as to what fate awaits us in the near future.
I felt totally powerless. Here and now nothing depended on me. No one will listen to the ravings of an ordinary soldier, who is not even a soldier yet, but a green rookie, who hasn't even smelled powder and isn't even assigned to any military unit.
I opened my eyes, stretched out my shoulders and back, and stood up from my seat. There was surprisingly no one at the small window, so I looked out.
The train still waddled leisurely forward, disguising itself with a column of smoke from the chimney. At another bend in the track, I was able to get a closer look at our echelon. At the last station, where the steam locomotive was refueled with water and coal, someone clever or just responsible enough decided not to neglect air defense equipment in the front-line zone and hitched a platform to the train with an anti-aircraft machine-gun mount of Tokarev design. The barrels of the 1931 Model Maxim quadruple-mounted machine guns stared up into the sky, and the helmets of the crew could be seen above the sandbags.
M4 quadruple anti-aircraft machine-gun mount. Its basis – four machine guns designed by Maxim. Developed by the team of N.F. Tokarev in 1928–1931. The mobile version was mounted on railroad platforms and in the bodies of trucks. Caliber 7.62 mm. Used to fight air targets at altitudes up to 1400 m. It was also successfully used against infantry and unarmored vehicles.
The presence of at least such protection from air attack could not help but rejoice me, but I did not believe in its high efficiency. It was a pity that the machine-gun platform was four cars away from me – if anything happened, I wouldn't even have time to warn the anti-aircraft gunners of the danger.
“What are you looking at?” Boris was there again.
“I just felt stuffy, so I thought I'd get some fresh air.”
“You call this smoke from a steam locomotive fresh air?” my traveling companion, who was overly talkative, grinned, wincing slightly.
The wind regularly blew coal smoke over the vans, and the smell was indeed not pleasant – it was an integral component of travel on the local railroads. In fact, that wasn't the end of the world yet. If we were moving through a tunnel…
A slight itch behind my ear made me wary. Something bad and dangerous happened not far from here, and the computer left behind in the damaged escape pod sent me an alert through one of the satellites. I put my face to the rushing air and closed my eyes.
Now it was as if I was in low orbit myself. The cloudless sky made it possible to see every little detail on the ground. However, even dense cloud cover could not cause much interference to the equipment of scientific satellites. I saw our train continuing westward, saw the anti-aircraft gunners who still didn't notice anything, and saw the low-flying targets approaching us from the southwest, highlighted by flickering red frames.
Messerschmitts Bf.109 – two pairs, one just above the other. They flew confidently, obviously aware of our train and not wanting to attract the attention of the train's air defense. They were less than a minute away from us. Explanatory inscriptions next to the enemy aircraft markers suggested that it was an 'E' modification. It was not the latest modification, but here, on the eastern front, the Germans used it as a fighter-bomber. Just what they need to attack our train.
What am I supposed to do? I certainly won't have time to warn anyone but my van mates. Of course, the train should have started braking by now, but it was not going too fast as it was. 30 seconds…
“Air!” I shouted, turning away from the window, “Everyone out of the van quickly!”
I rushed to the wagon door, threw the latch aside, and rested my shoulder against it. The doorframe slowly moved to the side.
“Why are you yelling?” Boris asked in surprise, looking out the window, “Leave the door alone! There's nobody there!”
“Open your eyes!” I snapped angrily, wrestling with the door, “Messerschmitts! Four of them. Coming in from the southwest!”
The long whistle of the locomotive and the sharp jerk of the train, which began to slow down, served as a good confirmation of my words, but I wasted no time in continuing the discussion, picked a moment when the ground rushing by seemed flat enough for me, pushed off harder, and jumped into the grass.
I landed pretty well; I rolled over a couple of times on not too rocky ground and didn't even seem to bruise myself. No one seemed to be in a hurry to follow my example, and in vain. Each enemy plane carried four machine guns of about eight millimeters caliber, plus bombs – a quarter of a ton of deadly cargo. It will be more than enough to destroy our wooden train.
I had managed to run far enough and fall into a small ravine, overgrown with not too dense bushes, when the first explosions and the crack of machine gun fire came from the head of the train. That's right, the locomotive is the primary target. But only two narrow silhouettes flashed there, and two other planes came in from the tail of the train and were now treating the train with bombs and machine-gun fire. Slivers fanned out from the roofs and walls of the cars. I tried not to think about what was going on inside. There was nothing I could do to help my dying comrades. I've already done everything I could.
The first to react to the enemy attack were the anti-aircraft gunners and NKVD fighters who accompanied our train. The quadruple machine guns were firing somewhere in the sky, but even I could see from my cover that the crew had very little, if any, experience firing at low-flying, high-speed targets. They were not leading correctly, and just didn't have time to correct the sight on the tracers. The train did stop, and now people were jumping out of the burning cars. I did not see any system in their actions. Some immediately fell to the ground, either killed or just looking for cover. Others tried to run to a forest that wasn't too far away, but it could only seem close when you weren't being shot at…
The NKVD platoon left its wagon in relative order, though I only counted half of its fighters at a glance. The others must have been killed in the shelling and bombing, but the commander was alive, and obeying his orders, the privates and sergeants scattered along the train, trying to bring some order to the chaos everywhere.
My hiding place was about 30 meters from the last car – despite the low speed, the train managed to pass quite a considerable distance, before it stopped. German planes flew in pairs over the broken train. They must have run out of bombs, but they kept shooting at the fleeing men with machine guns. Our anti-aircraft platform hadn't shown any signs of life for a minute. Through the smoke of the fire we could see the motionless barrels of Maxim machine guns looking helplessly into the sky. No one fired on the Messerschmitts, and they came at the target, as in a training exercise.
A soldier in NKVD uniform who had reached the last car shouted something, but I couldn't make it out because of the crackling of the machine guns and the roar of the fire. He tried to look inside the car, but it smelled so hot that he recoiled and took two awkward steps backward.
“Hide behind the wagon!” I yelled as I saw a string of bullet trails in the dust run along the train toward him.
The soldier heard me, but apparently did not understand what I wanted him to do. He just turned in my direction, but then a burst of machine-gun fire crossed his back, and he twitched several times and fell forward, instinctively trying to grab onto the wall of the car, but his arms, suddenly weak, slipped, and the guy slid to the ground, dropping his rifle.
Most of those who managed to jump out of the cars and didn't die in the first minutes of the bombing had already covered almost half the distance to the forest, but the enemy pilots were not going to give them a chance to get away alive. Some tried to hide in the folds of the terrain or pretend to be killed, but it did not help much. A man lying on the ground is too convenient a target for an airplane.
I didn't want to get out of my lucky hiding place at all. Here no one paid any attention to me, and the sloping earth walls provided reliable cover from the splinters. But 30 meters from my position there was a rifle, quite serviceable as it looked, and I knew that in my hands this weapon could give the men running toward the woods a few extra seconds.
Closing my eyes, I began to look at the area from above. The computer processed the image coming from orbit, filtering out the smoke, so I saw everything clearly enough. Waiting until both pairs of enemy planes were in an awkward position for an attack, I jumped out of the ravine and ran to the dead soldier, or rather, to the weapon that had fallen out of his hands.
The butt of the Mosin rifle fit comfortably in my palm. The weapon was indeed undamaged, and I considered myself very lucky, twice. I was lucky not only that the rifle was not smashed by bullets, but also that it was the weapon I had in my hands. True, it didn't have sights for shooting at high-speed, low-flying targets, but I didn't need them. But Mosin rifle had excellent accuracy by the standards of that time. The trick was that its barrel had a conical shape, tapering slightly from the breech end to the muzzle end. This resulted in additional compression of the bullet when fired and did not allow it to 'walk' in the bore.
After checking my weapon and making sure it was loaded and ready to fire, I took another look around the battlefield. The men running toward the woods needed another 30 seconds to reach cover, but both pairs of Messerschmitts, were already coming in to attack one by one.
I put the rifle to my shoulder and activated the combat mode of the sighting and navigation system. Of course, originally, it was not intended at all for shooting handguns at airplanes, but it had a lot of flexibility in settings, and in the last month and a half I had enough time to adapt my micro-implants and contact lenses to local realities.
Instead of solid smoke from a burning train, I saw clear skies with clear target marks and aiming points, that took into account the necessary deflection. The first pair of Messerschmitts was about to fly over the cars. I chose the leader, and pointed my weapon at the translucent outline of an airplane moving ahead of my target. A slight tingling sensation in my palms told me that the hand tremor suppression system had kicked in. I did the rough aiming of the rifle myself, but the bio-implants, which used my own nervous system, helped me to aim accurately. The trigger pull was long and heavy, which I knew in theory, but I still wasn't quite prepared for the fact that I had to pull the trigger so hard.
Shot! I moved the bolt handle to the left, then backward to the full, then I pushed the bolt forward and the handle to the right. Change of target… pointing… Shot!
