Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

‘What are you doing? It’s me,’ Benya said. ‘Put down the pistol. Are you lost too?’

‘Easy, now, Golden, easy. Yes, we’re lost,’ said Kapto, not holstering the pistol, just holding it.

‘How is she?’ Benya looked at the child.

‘She’s going to be fine. No amount of care is too much for her. A doctor’s duty doesn’t just end with saving a life, we must nurture, we must tend—’

‘Ah yes: those we heal we must also cherish,’ Benya quoted Kapto’s motto back to him.

Kapto gave a lineless smile above his heart-shaped chin.

‘I fell asleep in the saddle,’ said Benya. ‘Stupid of me. But the unit must be just across this field. Are you coming?’

‘Good luck, friend,’ said Kapto. ‘Ours is another way…’ And he nodded at Benya, and rode on.

Ten minutes later, Benya met up with Prishchepa and took his place. Melishko rode out in front to meet the scouts coming back from reconnaissance, headed by Panka.

‘How many men in the village?’ asked Melishko. Ganakovich and Zhurko were beside him.

‘A few hundred,’ replied Panka, saluting.

‘Mandryka?’

‘He’s there, ruling his men like a Tartar khan.’

‘Are there Germans there too?’

‘We saw special SS task groups,’ Panka said.

‘Why are you alone, sergeant? What happened to the Cossacks I sent with you? Where are Delibash and Grishchuk?’

Panka looked awkward and said nothing.

‘Speak up, sergeant.’

Panka patted his horse.

‘They defected?’

He nodded.

‘Ah. Well, they won’t be the last,’ said Zhurko.

Benya turned in his saddle, looking for Kapto with the queerest feeling in his belly.

‘Where’s the doctor?’ he asked Prishchepa.

‘Don’t you know? He defected with the nurse, Tonya.’

Abruptly Benya understood their encounter. ‘Good luck, friend,’ Kapto had said. Was he mocking him? Tonya’s stare had been contemptuous, he now realized. Benya was bewildered. Simple Cossacks and boneheaded villagers might join the Nazis – but the Baby Doctor, his friend? How could he join the Nazis after seeing the massacre? And what would happen to the child? For some men, war was a liberation that allowed them to become whomsoever they wanted, to play out infernal fantasies and unbridle unspeakable passions, Benya thought. Men without nerves would enjoy short reigns of glory before the world tilted back but quite long enough to destroy so many lives… Yet Kapto had never uttered a word about politics. So who was he really? There was something else. If Kapto and the others had defected to the Nazis, Mandryka would be expecting them…

Ganakovich drew his Nagant and turned to the men: ‘Any traitors will be hunted down and executed! Their families arrested. Ride, motherfuckers, or I shoot…’

‘Not now.’ Melishko put his hand on Ganakovich’s arm, and summoned Panka. ‘Sergeant, do we have any Product Sixty-One?’

‘Yes sir. The usual hundred grammes?’

‘No, distribute it all right away.’ At a nod from Melishko, Panka rode through the ranks, ladling out the vodka in a steel thimble hanging from his belt. Benya downed three of them, feeling the molten lurch as the alcohol kicked in. Then Melishko himself rode down the line on Elephant.

‘Remember,’ he told the men. ‘The war’s not lost. Russia is vast, and Hitler’s a madman if he thinks he can defeat us. Napoleon took Moscow but Tsar Alexander rode his Cossacks all the way to Paris. Yes, to Paris! This offensive is Hitler’s last gamble. You’ve already beaten the odds. We broke through, didn’t we? This is our mission against the men who killed those people – and if we succeed, I will recommend every one of you for redemption, I promise. We give no quarter to traitors, and we ride to kill Mandryka. We’ll make it, bandits. YOU CAN’T GET ME!’

In this scruffy, brusque growl of a man, Benya sensed the noble and fathomless depths of Mother Russia.

‘Bandits!’ Melishko drew his sabre and raised it. ‘Squadrons, forward at the trot! Draw sabres! Forward…’

The Cossacks were standing high in their stirrups; Benya raised his sabre and felt his blood changing, almost frothing in his veins with anger, with exhilaration. For a man who often couldn’t decide whether to order absinthe or cognac, and even sometimes which girl to choose, war granted simplicity: advance, retreat; live, die. Around him was the rhythmic thud of hooves as they changed from trot to lope to canter to gallop. He recited Gorky to himself: ‘Those who are born to crawl cannot fly.’ Now he was flying!

Then all of it was drowned out by something cruder and louder and for a second Benya could not understand what it was – and then he felt the force of it and heard the chugging as the belts worked their way through the heavy machine guns in the nests hidden in the rye of the fields. Next to Benya, Lover-boy Cherkashkin was trying to hold on to his horse’s mane but, as the animal fell, he came out of his saddle, catapulted high into the air and over the rump, his sabre flying, his rifle tangled round his neck, his mouth a perfect ‘O’ of surprise. Men were falling all around him. Shundenko was being dragged by his foot behind his horse. He saw Cut and Run Ivanov riding on but with a chunk taken out of his face. Clinging on to Silver Socks, one foot out of his stirrups, he noticed that many of the horses around him were riderless. Amid the machine-gun fire, Socks reared up and tried to turn and Benya, having lost both his stirrups now, somersaulted right over the horse’s head.

It was a relief to lie there in the sweet rye and imagine that he was about to die and that all this striving and gunfire was almost finished. Weariness like warm water rose within him, a benumbed heaviness. He feared Silver Socks was hurt and wished he could find her but she was gone. He knew he had been hit, and was surprised he wasn’t in more pain as the deep metallic crack of the guns kept raking over him, and blood ran down his forehead into his eyes.

In front of him, he could hear voices in German and Russian talking between bursts of the big guns. Soon the men would come out and walk through the field, mopping up, and these irregulars were notoriously cruel. It was unlikely they would leave anyone alive.

Benya lay back and looked up at the long teal sky, but unlike earlier that morning, the blueness seemed utterly bleak and stark. He passed out, and when he awoke, he was being half pulled, half lifted backwards. The process was agonizingly slow. There was a burst of machine-gun fire, lighter this time, and the man pulling Benya gasped for a second, shook then went on. Soon they were in higher steppe grass beyond this blood harvest, and someone was giving Benya water. He sat up and wiped his face, but he saw they were tending another man right beside him, the man who had saved him, who had dragged him to safety. They were working on him, opening his shirt, but Prishchepa shook his head.

‘He’s gone,’ he said and they laid him down. It was Ganakovich.

‘Him…?’ Benya was confounded: the Politruk who had executed an innocent boy was the same man who had sacrificed his own life to save Benya?

‘Sometimes a crow flies as an eagle,’ said Prishchepa, looking at Benya now.

Benya felt fireworks exploding behind his eyes, silver hammers beating in his temple and he fell sideways.

‘You have a bang on your head, and a cut on your forehead. You’ll be OK in a minute,’ said Zhurko.

‘We have to go right now,’ Spider Garanzha told them. ‘I have horses for all of us and a surprise for you, Golden.’ Spider was holding Socks by the reins. ‘She found us. She’s unscathed. Even her stitches are almost healed.’

Getting to his feet, Benya took Socks’s reins and kissed her neck, burying his face in the mane. Never had he been more relieved to see anyone. Then they heard a voice from out on the field, a voice they all knew.