the darkness entered the German under his left shoulder blade, and he fell forward onto the parapet from behind which he had been watching. The binoculars gleamed in the glow of another "chandelier" and slid down the slope into the darkness below. As it did so, it made a rather loud bang, but it didn't matter – the machine gunner had already noticed the danger, so he became my second target.
20 meters is still a lot for a knife, especially if the target is not attached to the ground. The German dodged it! I don't think he had time to react to my knife throw. Rather, the fate of the Feldwebel told him the only correct course of action. The machine gunner ducked and crouched at the bottom of the trench, and the knife jingled loudly against the MG-34 mounting. The situation was corrected by Ignatov, who had already managed to overcome the distance to the German trench and jumped on the back of the enemy, who had begun to straighten up. I couldn't see how he handled the German, but it didn't take the Sergeant more than a couple of seconds.
Shcheglov and Nikiforov wasted no time either, they were busy working on their goals. There were no Germans left alive at the machine-gun position, but we could not do everything quietly, and the sounds that reached the neighboring trenches made the Germans wary.
A few sharp commands rang out, and some movement began in the trenches of the neighboring squad.
“Throw grenades into the ravine, quickly!” ordered Shcheglov, not forgetting about the Germans sitting in ambush.
I ripped a grenade from my belt, unpinned it and threw the F-1 over the edge of the ravine. I wasn't interested in its fate – I finally jumped into the trench and got to the machine gun. At the same time as the first long burst hit the left side of the enemy trenches and passageways, flares – two white and one red – flew up into the air behind me with a hiss.
A little ahead I saw flashes of gunfire and heard the distinctive crackle of PPSh submachine guns – my comrades had also opened fire. I distracted myself for a second, trying to figure out where we were most threatened. There was no movement in the ravine – our grenades seemed to have fallen well. The Hauptmann prisoner was lying at the bottom of the trench in a fetal position, and Remizov, standing above him, was firing his submachine gun toward the Germans.
The return fire now was still weak and inaccurate, but the enemy was quickly coming to his senses. The main thing that made me very unhappy was some kind of sluggish reaction to our signal on the Soviet side. I couldn't say nothing was going on there, but I wasn't seeing intense preparation for an attack there yet.
When I turned my attention back to the Germans, I saw a very unpleasant picture. The platoon whose position we were attacking had two more machine guns besides my MG-34, and now they were turning toward us. The machine gunners weren't firing yet, for fear of hitting their soldiers in the dark, but I knew that very soon they would figure it out and open devastating fire on us. Another serious problem was the dugout in the second line of trenches. It seemed to be where the rest of the soldiers of the platoon were sleeping, and now they were actively moving, leaving the shelter and obviously coming to visit us.
I heard Shcheglov's command: “Don't let them within grenade throwing distance!”
This command directly concerned me, too, but first I had to do something about the machine guns and the infantry rushing in. I took my last grenade off my belt. The Germans jumping out of the dugout were 80 meters away. Some of the soldiers were already out of the trenches, and some of them were still just leaving the shelter. I chose the trajectory so that the fuse burned out while still in the air, and the grenade exploded over the Germans' heads. It's hard to make a good grenade throw from a trench, but combat mode can do much more than that. My shoulder was sore – after all, my body hadn't fully recovered from the boat ride, and now the bio-implants had to strain my muscles again.
I had no time to follow the flight and explosion of the grenade. I picked up my MG-34 again and found the positions of the German machine gunners. They oriented themselves to the situation and opened heavy fire over the heads of their infantry, trying to pin the Russian saboteurs to the ground. Two short bursts silenced them, but the enemy had an overwhelming advantage over us even without machine guns.
A series of explosions rumbled about 50 meters from us, somewhere in the middle between the first and second lines of German trenches, it was a Soviet mortar battery that opened fire. That was great, but what we needed now was something else entirely – a quick attack on the section of the German platoon that we had disorganized, while simultaneously suppressing its neighbors to the right and left with artillery fire.
The night battle was spreading like wildfire. The Soviet mortar men's strike was immediately countered by their German counterparts. A little later the artillery got involved in the battle. The density of German fire increased as more and more enemy soldiers approached the battlefield. I tried my best to regulate their numbers with a machine gun, but the winding passages allowed the Germans to get closer and closer. Soon I was concentrating only on the most dangerous targets, namely, enemy soldiers already ready to throw a grenade. The consequence of my efforts was several explosions right in the enemy's battle lines – the grenade throwers I killed or wounded blew themselves up together with their own comrades. This somewhat dampened the ardor of the German infantry, but it cannot be said that our prospects became brighter – the Red Army soldiers from our trenches still did not rise to the attack.
“We have to get out of here, Nagulin!” I heard the voice of Shcheglov, who had been pushed back by the Germans along with Ignatov and Nikiforov almost to my position, “Looks like there won't be an attack!”
“If we get out of the trenches, we will be cut down at once, or destroyed by mortars in the field,” I shouted back without stopping to shoot.
“We're sure to get crushed here, but this way we'll have at least a chance!”
“Take the prisoner and retreat through the ravine! I'll cover you with machine gun fire. You will have a two or three minute head start.”
Shcheglov did not answer anything, but fiercely let out a long burst from his PPSh, slightly elevating over the parapet, and then shouted out: “Fighters, follow me! We're pulling back! Take care of the prisoner!”
This order did not apply to me. Shcheglov did not say any solemn words and preferred not to say goodbye at all, for which I was very grateful to him.
The Germans were lingering. They were still confident that the Russians weren't going anywhere and were pulling up their forces for another attack. I managed to reload my machine gun before the group left, and now I had a hundred rounds to spare, but I still would not have been able to withstand a simultaneous attack from different sides.
To the right, beyond the ravine, there were enemy soldiers, too, but they did not fire yet, for fear of hitting their own, while at the same time, they did not want to climb the mined slopes in the dark. The view from orbit showed the utter hopelessness of the situation. The Germans would have launched a decisive attack had it not been for the rather intense mortar and artillery fire from the Soviet side, but for now they waited out the artillery preparations.
The night's darkness was broken by an eerie howl. The ground shook violently and tons of earth, illuminated by a bright flash, rose into the air a hundred meters to my right. Seconds later a similar fire geyser rose among the German trenches on the left. The howling continued, and I think I now understood what our infantry were waiting for. The command of the Southwestern Front finally realized that the Kremenchuk bridgehead could pose a significant threat, and it allocated to the 38th Army from its scarce reserves an artillery regiment of the Reserve of the Supreme High Command, which included a B-4 howitzer division.
The three minutes I had promised Shcheglov were over, and if I wanted to keep walking on this planet, I had to act immediately – there could be no better moment. I fired a long burst from the machine gun, using up the rest of my belt. My bullets didn't hit any of my opponents, but I hoped it made them think twice about whether they should stick out from behind the parapet right now.
A few steps behind me there was a ravine, and in a second I was rolling down the slippery slope, twisting and tumbling so as not to run into the mines that were not too densely laid by the Germans. The 203 millimeter "suitcases" continued to howl in the sky, unleashing