The shell hit the tank’s ammunition rack. The explosion was a dull whump that Viktor felt in his teeth. A piece of turret armor—red-hot and jagged—spiraled through the air and landed in the mud beside him, hissing.

“Comrade Lieutenant,” his driver, Petyr, whispered through the intercom. “The mud. It’s up to the final drive. If we stop, we’re a bunker.”

The first shell tore through the roof. The second exploded inside. The third was unnecessary. From the burning barn, German infantry boiled out like ants from a kicked mound—grey shapes scattering toward a drainage ditch.