Free In the Balance by Harry Turtledove

turret of the tank he personally commanded, radioed division headquarters to see if orders had changed since yesterday. “No, we still want you to shift to map square B-9,” the signal lieutenant answered. “How do you read my transmission, by the way?”
    “Well enough,” Jäger said. “Why?”
    “We had some trouble earlier,” the signalman answered. “After that explosion in the sky, reception went into the toilet for a while. Glad it didn’t trouble you.”
    “Me, too,” Jäger said. “Out.” He unfolded his map, studied it. If he was where he thought he was, he and his panzers needed to make about twenty kilometers to get to where they were supposed to be. He leaned down into the crew compartment of the tank, called to the driver. “Let’s go. East.”
    “East it is.” Dieter Schmidt put the Panzer III into gear. The roar of the Maybach HL120TR engine changed pitch. The tank began to roll ahead, chewing two lines through the grass and dirt of the steppe. The engine went up the scale and down, up and down, as Schmidt worked his way through the six forward speeds of the gearbox.
    The dustbin cupola at the back of the turret gave a decent view even when closed down. Like any tank commander worth his black coveralls, Jäger left it open and stood up in it whenever he could. Not only could he see more than even through good periscopes, the air was fresher and cooler and the racket less—or at least different. He traded being surrounded by engine rumble for the iron clash and rattle of the spare wheels and tracks lashed to the tank’s rear deck.
    He frowned a little. If the German logistics train were better run, he wouldn’t have had to carry his own spares to make sure they were there when he needed them. But the eastern front ran more than three thousand kilometers from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Expecting the high foreheads who were out of harm’s way to care what happened to any one tank commander was too much to hope for.
    The panzers rolled through the detritus of battle, past graves hastily dug in the rich dark soil of the Ukraine; past stinking, bloated Russian corpses still unburied; past wrecked trucks and tanks of both the
Wehrmacht
and the Red Army. German engineers swarmed over those like flies over the corpses, salvaging whatever they could.
    The gently rolling country stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see. Not even war’s wounds scarred it too Severely. Sometimes when Jäger looked out across that sea of green, his dozen tanks seemed all alone. He grinned when, off in the distance, he spied a German infantry company.
    Once or twice, planes buzzed by overhead. That made him grin more widely. Somewhere east of Izyum, Ivan was going to catch hell.
    A noise like the end of the world—the panzer a couple of hundred meters to his right went up in a fireball. One second it was there, the next nothing but red and yellow flame and a column of black, greasy smoke mounting to the sky. A moment later came the barks of secondary explosions as the tank’s ammunition began going off. The five-man crew couldn’t have known what hit them. Jäger told himself that, anyhow, as he dove down inside the turret.
    “What the fuck was that?” asked Georg Schultz. The gunner had heard the blast through thick steel and through the racket of his own tank’s motor.
    “Joachim’s tank just went up,” Jäger answered. “Must have bit a mine—but the Ivans aren’t supposed to have laid any mines around here.” His voice showed his doubt, the explosion had been very violent for a mine.
Maybe if the blast went up into the gas tank
, the captain thought. No sooner had the idea crossed his mind then another panzer went up with an even louder detonation than the first.
    “Jesus!” Schultz shouted. He stared fearfully at the metal floor of the tank, as if wondering when a white-hot jet of flame would burst through it.
    Jäger grabbed for the radio that linked him with the rest of the company,