400 meters. I guess it's too early to shoot – I don't want to scare off the enemy. If he refuses to attack and tries to come in from the side, it will be much more difficult – in the Pe-2 defense this is another weak point.
300 meters.
“This is "Blackbird-2". Permission to attack! He's going to shoot you!”
“Stand down!”
The distance is 250 meters. I think it's time. The aiming markers aligned on the enemy plane. The computer shows the probability of hitting the target at the edge of my field of view. Almost 90 %. A burst! It is beginning to get dark, and tracers paint the sky with bright strokes. Missed! How did he make it?! What did he feel? I don't have an answer, but at the last moment the Messerschmitt twitched to the side and the burst went by. Now he's going to go into a blind spot, and it's going to be really bad. A wounded Yak is no help to us, hence… A burst! Some rags fly from our own tail – a couple of my bullets stroke against the keel of the plane. A hundred meters away, a hot fire is blazing right through the sky. Still, the incendiary bullets that could set even a protected gas tank on fire came in handy. The German shoots back. It looks like he's just guessing, but our long-suffering tail catches another hit.
“How's the plane?”
“It obeys the rudders,” answers Lieutenant Kalina in a slightly hoarse voice.
Below us there is a bright flash – a shot-down Messerschmitt has met the ground.
Staff Sergeant Silin, call sign "Blackbird-2", followed the landing of the bomber and also led his fighter to the ground. The plane obeyed him reluctantly, as if it had suddenly become many hundreds of kilos heavier. The landing gear struts came out smoothly, good thing there was no problem with that at least, and the Yak rolled hard on the ground of the runway.
A little to the side, Silin noticed the plane of Junior Lieutenant Kostrov, all blackened, with the cockpit canopy splattered with oil. So Ivan made it to the airfield, and even managed to land the damaged plane. That's good, though of course they won't get their commander back.
The Staff Sergeant struggled to get out of the cockpit and took a couple of steps toward the men running toward him.
“Are you hurt?” Silin was asked by an unfamiliar technician who ran up first.
“No,” the pilot shook his head in the negative, “but it looks like the fighter needs some serious repairs.”
“You've been through a lot.”
“We lost our commander. He was killed with the first burst – no luck. But we took out two of them, too.”
“Well, if they confirm it,” the technician nodded toward the Pe-2, "I think they'll give you both wins. Who distinguished himself?”
“They did,” said Silin with a crooked grin.
“I don't understand…”
“And what is there to understand? Both fascists were driven into the ground by the Pawn's gunner. That's how it happens.”
Chapter 3
As Sudoplatov told me in the morning, the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command had already prepared another plan to unblock the troops, encircled in the Kiev pocket, without my brilliant advice. This time the plan was to launch simultaneous strikes from outside and inside the ring at night to negate German air superiority in the initial phase of the operation.
Beria hesitated for a long time before informing Stalin of my proposal, but it required virtually no changes to the already developed plan, and the head of the NKVD decided that it couldn't get any worse.
After heavy losses suffered by Soviet long-range aviation at the beginning of the war, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief forbade the use of the TB-7 without his direct permission, so the Commissar of Internal Affairs had to resolve the issue directly with the Chief. Despite Beria's fears, Stalin hardly hesitated.
“Go ahead, Comrade Beria,” he nodded as he listened to the Commissar's report. “We are obliged to take every opportunity to increase our chances of a successful operation. Within reasonable limits, of course, and under your personal responsibility.”
As a result, the implementation of my plan ended up in the hands of the NKVD, and I still had to report to my direct superior.
“Comrade Senior Major of State Security,” I began my report as soon as we were alone, “the reconnaissance flight was successful. The data for the night bombing strike is sufficiently collected. One fighter was lost. The pilot was killed. The other planes sustained varying degrees of damage.”
“I'm surprised you came back from there at all,” Sudoplatov answered grimly. “Mark on the map what you saw, and you can rest for a couple of hours. TB-7s and Yer-2s will be over our airfield at exactly zero o'clock. By that time you should already be in the air.”
The Headquarters of the Supreme High Command plan was not bad, but it had no chance of success because of the incorrect background information underlying it. The Red Army's intelligence could not uncover the Germans' plan and did not notice how the Wehrmacht's Fourth Panzer Group, which had been advancing on Leningrad until then, suddenly disappeared from under the besieged city and was redeployed to the Moscow direction. The cunning Germans left one of the radio operators of the Panzer Group near Leningrad, who had a specific easily recognizable 'handwriting' – individual features of signal transmission – , and the radio reconnaissance did not reveal any dramatic changes in the German forces.
The enemy was preparing for an attack on Moscow, gathering virtually all of its tank forces into a single fist, except for Kleist's First Panzer Group, which had gone south to capture the Donbass. But even without it, such forces were concentrated on the Moscow direction, to which the 21st and 40th Armies could not oppose anything. In addition, General Rommel's divisions, which had just arrived in France from North Africa, were reinforced with new tanks and other equipment and were preparing to move to Bryansk and Vyazma.
Only the need to finally eliminate the grouping of Soviet troops near Kiev, which was encircled and already split into two parts, was holding back the whole German armada from rushing to the Soviet capital.
However, the Soviet command did not know all this, and now the two armies were preparing to launch an unblocking strike, while the troops of the Bryansk Front had to actively bind up the German forces in order to make it difficult for the enemy to transfer reserves to the threatened directions. The armies in the pocket assembled few combat-ready formations to break through. Driver mechanics poured the last liters of fuel into the tanks of several dozen surviving combat vehicles, and artillerymen gathered the pitiful remains of ammunition for the few serviceable guns from field depots. I knew I couldn't get everyone out of the pocket, but I was going to give at least some of them a chance.
When Lieutenant Kalina's Pe-2, hastily repaired, took off, the entire horizon to the west was already thundering with explosions and glowing with white chemical light from the many hundreds of "chandeliers" suspended over the battlefield by our troops and the Germans.
We took off just in time. Two flights of TB-7s and four Yer-2s were approaching the front line a couple of kilometers behind our aircraft at an altitude of 6,000 meters. Ten long-range bombers, as I requested. All together they carried 40 tons of high-explosive bombs weighing from 250 kilograms to a ton.
So far the armies of Kuznetsov and Podlas have been successful. The plan called for two powerful converging strikes in the general direction of Romny. Both commanders managed to stealthily move the BM-13 divisions assigned to them into position at dusk. The Germans, confident in the effectiveness of their aerial reconnaissance, did not expect massive artillery fire, and the barrage